Radically as Dr. Cronin's new novel ["Three Loves"] differs in plot and episode from "Hatter's Castle," so indelibly does this author impress his personality on his work that one will recognize the same hand behind both. Nor is this all, for in one particular is there similarity. In the first of the two books it is a man's stubbornness, an uprightness that leans backward, that eventually accomplishes his ruin. In "Three Loves" it is a woman's stubbornness. Here, however, the analogy ends. In "Hatter's Castle" James Brodie breaks most of the lives about him, and his own defeat is unrelieved by anything that could be called a victory. Lucy Moore, on the other hand, although she brings sufficient pain to others, and a major portion of pain to herself, does to no one irreparable injury; and there is something of victory in her own ultimate defeat. "Three Loves" is, therefore, a softer book than was "Hatter's Castle."

But the adjective is to be used only in the comparative degree, for by no stretch of the imagination might even the present work be called a wholly gentle story. It would appear that Dr. Cronin has seen too much of human beings to be deceived into finding them other than they mostly are. Goodness and badness, capacity to yield and inability to yield, weakness and strength, insight to love wisely, and the blindness that makes wisdom in love impossible—all of these Dr. Cronin finds inextricably woven and tumbled together in the people about him. Consequently, he is a clairvoyant novelist; and welcome on that account.

From the title one might easily be led to expect either a romance or one of those analytical studies so much indulged in today. But "Three Loves" is neither. Lucy Moore, a Scotch Highland lass of the Murray clan by birth, is happily married, and the first of the trio of "loves" is her husband. The second is her son—a child at the outset of the story. And the third is God. That people ofttimes are bruised by love is a common thesis of the novelists. But Dr. Cronin has turned things about. Lucy is not bruised by love, she bruises herself on love. In the stubbornness of upright pride she batters herself to pieces against her surroundings, as James Brodie, in "Hatter's Castle," battered himself to pieces.

Lucy Murray, to judge from the story, was a winsome lass when she married the Irish lad, Frank Moore. Their little boy, Peter, was a likable youngster. In the opinion of her kinsfolk Lucy married beneath her family. On the whole, however, this attitude seems to have been adopted by them as an excuse for not helping her in time of financial distress rather than to have had any foundation in fact: Moore was sober and industrious, kind and measurably understanding. Perhaps it is Dr. Cronin's premise that the more easygoing disposition of the Irish prevents them from fully understanding that dourness so prevalent among the Scotch, a premise that was hinted at more than once in "Hatter's Castle."…

[Later,] Frank meets his death when the small boat he is in is run down in the fog. Incidentally, the short and swift narration of the events taking place behind the wall of mist, the pathos (for Lucy is aboard the craft that cuts Frank down), the deftness of sentence and the economy of description, all combine to render this one of the memorable things in recent fiction.

Bereft of her husband, Lucy centres her whole life upon the little boy, placing him in a school in Ireland, and slaving to support herself and him…. When her former employer, old Lennox, asks Lucy to marry him, and she refuses, more than one reader may be tempted to feel that the novelist has taken an unfair advantage of his heroine. For, even if narrow and, perhaps, a little close, nevertheless Lennox was friendly and kind and sufficiently generous so that Lucy would have been assured of comforts and Peter of the university career which had begun to seem impossible. To those, however, whose reading has been among the novelists of the ultra-modern school, Lucy's attitude is readily understandable, for the reason that those novelists have dwelt insistently on the mother-son complex. And it might have been well had Dr. Cronin taken a leaf from their textbook here and made the mother's psychology more clear than he does. Perhaps in his capacity of physician he had so often come into contact with such exaggerated and purblind maternal jealousy he failed to perceive that a reader might not realize at once that Lucy's refusal is due to her fear that a step-father might in some indefinable way come between herself and the boy.

It may be imagined that it will be the purpose of the author of "Three Loves" to have Peter go to the dogs. But it is not. Subsisting on an incredible paucity of shillings a week, Lucy puts Peter through the university (he had won a small scholarship) and he is graduated in medicine. Lucy, although only a few years over 40, has by this time worn herself to the bone, and is an object of great pity. Truly, Scotch stubbornness is a fearsome thing. And the more is she to be pitied, for a second time does her pride render her blind. Because of her insane fear of losing her hold on Peter she tries to prevent his marriage. So he carries it through secretly. It is an excellent marriage, but she was adamant against it. And again she meets defeat at the hands of pride. In her extremity she turns to religion.

Subtly aware of all the forces that have been working for so long within this woman of his creative imagination, Dr. Cronin lets it be known that Lucy's "vision" is due largely to undernourishment and although he will push her to the length of courting, as it were, martyrdom by seeking to join a religious order dedicated to the most rigorous discipline, it is clear he holds no brief either for or against that phase of the religious life. But he understands it, and the pages that deal with Lucy's convent life, an unusual situation for a novelist to handle, are done with understanding, delicacy and beauty.

Again it is Lucy's stubbornness that defeats her. She cannot, in the way she has elected, give herself to her third love, religion. As she managed Frank, and then Peter, so she must manage God. Gently, nay, with tenderness, nevertheless with firmness, Lucy, emaciated, and with a heart fatally deranged from her long struggle with hunger, want and disappointment, dies without again meeting Peter to whom she would return. Victory? Yes. Though a pyrrhic one. For Lucy has been of that indomitable company that never surrenders. Perhaps, however, there is something of irony intended also. Like James Brodie, Lucy Moore is not one we should either wish to be or to come into contact with!

"Three Loves" is a novel "of parts," as our elders might have said. And A. J. Cronin has again demonstrated that he has something to contribute to English fiction.