If "Emmeline" is a novel it is Judith Rossner's sixth…. A prefatory note explains that the author heard about Emmeline from one Nettie Mitchell, 94, who knew her when "she herself was a child and Emmeline an old woman." Nettie herself might be a fictional device, but even if she is not, responsibility remains with the author to make the title character, her ordeal, relationships and milieu real. (p. 13)

It is often discourteous and unnecessary to reveal a novel's plot, but in this case unfortunately the crudeness of the plot cannot be ignored: it thoroughly undermines the book's literary character.

[After giving her baby up for adoption], Emmeline stays at home for many peaceful years, working hard while her parents age and her siblings grow up and get married. Finally, in the era of the Civil War, she abandons her resolution to remain single and permits herself to be wooed by a robust young road-builder who has wandered into town from out West. They marry, after overcoming opposition from Emmeline's father, and build a house across the road from the main Mosher property. Then the aunt, who for obscure reasons has never showed up since Emmeline returned home from Lynn, pays a visit and is introduced to her niece's new husband. A dreadful scene ensues. You've guessed it. The unlucky woman has married and bedded her own son.

There is more to tell of the heroine, as she suffers her pariah or taboo phase, but this can be left to the reader to discover. Instead it's necessary to note the sombre even lugubrious manner in which the story is told and to observe that the narrative crudely suppresses information and resorts to wild coincidence to entangle the lives of mother and son. (pp. 13, 46)

"Emmeline" is as dull as a tribal myth inculcating the advantages of exogamy over endogamy. Its authenticity is of a kind with the scandalous stories that have always circulated in that part of the rural Northeast that used to be called "the incest belt." But most lacking in "Emmeline" are the poise and shapely imaginative life of artistic prose fiction. (p. 46)