Word: egges
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...essentially a literary cliche: the world microcosm, the great passions of the large war replicated on a smaller scale, not among nations, but among a small group of individuals. In the beginning there is peace and a rustic scene of a small girls' school preparing for a charity Easter egg hunt. This Easter peace is broken when one of the young students at the school is discovered to be missing...
Gillian Freeman, who is quite literate, is a writer in the Austen tradition. With its gothic surprise ending and all, the plot of An Easter Egg Hunt could be summarized in a couple of lines. Yet Freeman does more than merely tell a story. She re-creates an era. The story is set in the famed English countryside, during World War I. The Great War intrudes on the narrative no more than it intrudes on the small girls' school in which the action transpires. Tightened food supplies and army cadets training nearby are the only evidence in the girls' little...
...detail allows for subtle echoings and image patterns. There is, for example, a recurrent image of infertility. Marriages that were never really marriages. A long line of titled nobility ending in an imbecile son. Secret abortions. And of course the primary image, the decorated, but hollowed-out, Easter egg...
Everywhere, Warner casts her spell, literally. Her mother's ritual for boiling an egg becomes just that. In a piece on folk recipes-a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart-the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance...
...however, strongly support Hume's greatness on the ground that the force of his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before the horse in either case, merely the old problem of which came first, the chicken or the egg. In any case, there is much to be said on both sides...