This is the second installment in my collection of posts on rare books written by Josephine Leslie, who wrote under the pseudonym, R. A. Dick. As I've stated before, her only book that is really remembered is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Here is the description on the back of The Devil and Mrs. Devine:
Barely out of her teens, winsome Danielle
Devine was already an orphan and a widow.
No man on earth, it seemed, could be to her
what her loving father and handsome young
husband had been. Was she doomed, then, to
wither into joyless old age? "No!" whispered
a strange, uncanny voice, a voice that seemed
to come from nowhere, promising Danielle
perpetual beauty - in exchange for her im-
mortal soul ...
In this tale of romance that spans two centu-
ries, the author of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
tells of one woman's quest for the peace and
salvation that only the greatest love, human
and divine, can bring.
This book, written in 1974, didn't impress me as much as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Duet for Two Hands. The premise sounded intriguing. It's basically about a woman who is plagued by hearing the voice of the Devil, and he has given her eternal youth in exchange for her soul. She can supposedly die whenever she wants. Two hundred years are covered, and so the book is extremely fast paced....too fast paced. A lot happens in the story, but there is very little substance and the plot is pretty predictable. For what it's worth, it is a reasonably entertaining book. Just don't expect it to be John Steinbeck. Fans of gothic romance novels may really enjoy it though.
There is of course one obvious theme that all of Leslie's books have had in common so far. They are all about a woman possessed by some supernatural being (ghost, a twin that resides in the mind, and the Devil). They are all basically romance novels as well. I'd like to know more about Josephine Leslie, but google searches have thus far yielded very little information.
I have one more book to cover by this author entitled She Walked to the Wedding.
I have a copy of a The Adventures of Juma, a book by R A Dick published in 1949by the Museum Press in London. It is a book for children about an African boy who comes to England in search of the family he worked for a "piccanin" (small boy to do odd jobs, according to the author's footnotes). It is dedicated to Penelope and Martin
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