The author, already known for her poetry, revealed herself as a brilliant prose writer, a unique chronicler of her native Indiana. “Twenty years have gone by since the publication of Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias. It is an extraordinary cosmos, shorn of fixities and definites, subservient to a central theme, ultimately abstract in purport, ambitious beyond fulfillment.”īy Marianne Hauser. Through a dozen characters, manifested in as many hundreds of pages, Miss Young explores with single-minded passion the residual questions in all fiction, including the validity of dreams, the deception of appearances, the confusion of identities, and the multiplicity of selves that cluster in each seemingly integral being….The effect of this style is of some vast, uninterrupted discourse, as if life were being patiently heaped and endorsed rather than hotheadedly seized and rendered up. It is an anatomy not so much of melancholy as of reality. “Marguerite Young’s first novel, famously in gestation for many years, proves to be more or less than a novel. This week number one on the Bestseller List, Fiction, for 15 weeks was The Source, by James A.

New York Herald Tribune, 12 September 1965:Book Reviews, 1&24. Or is it that in reading the reissue of Angel in the Forest in 1966 the reader confronts the text with an altered sensibility, one that is uncomfortable unless it encompasses irony?” Yet in 1945 when Marguerite Young originally published her superb historical epic on two utopias, she anticipated a new American sensibility, one that was beginning to be wary, to be suspect of the dreamer. Robert Owen, ‘the father of modern socialism,’ who envisioned a science of society, was then magic enough for the writer of fable. They themselves were a bit wild, dreamers, idealists, creators of fantasies spun not out of drugs and drink, but out of their dreams of society.

“Twenty years ago the ‘intellectual eccentric’ still engaged the sympathetic attention of our writers and poets. Miss Young, on the contrary, is prodigal of her talent, and her book suffers from her excessive absorption in its theme.”ġ966 Reprint of Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopiasīy Harriet Zinnes. “Marguerite Young’s first prose volume is repetitive, obscure, diffuse, overwritten, tiresomely obsessed with copulation and with analogical images of flowers, insects, and birds, scornful at many points of coherence, continuity, and form yet it is a book of astonishing subtlet and brilliance, a genuine work of art, and together with her two previous volumes of verse it should establish its author as one of the truly notable writers of her generation. NY: Reynal and Hitchcock, $3.īy Martin Lebowitz. Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias

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