Love story from India's past
The Emerald Peacock. By Katharine Gordon. Hodder and Stoughton. 250 pp. $10.90. (Reviewed by Tui Thomas) Only one who has lived in India close to the people, sharing their customs and understanding the reason for them, could capture the mystique of the country and write about it with such compelling strength. Katharine Gordon did live in India for many years and became so enamoured with the place that she left it “with great pain." The love story she tells of an Irish colonel’s young daughter and the heir to a hill country
kingdom, with an emerald peacock as a State symbol of power, is based on fact. The setting is the bloody Indian Mutiny of 1857. The novel is written with such depth of feeling and vivid description of the terrain that it might well be partly autobiographical — taken from personal experience in later years. Treachery and loyalty, love and hale, intrigue and honour form a tug-of-war pattern that runs through the gripping story in which an innocent, courageous bride tries to come to terms with an entirely new way of life among her husband’s superstitious people.
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Press, 27 January 1979, Page 17
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192Love story from India's past Press, 27 January 1979, Page 17
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