[In the following review of Windswept, Woods says that she finds beauty in Chase's celebration of traditional values.]

House and headland, Windswept stood solitary and stalwart against the buffeting of gales and ocean, on the bold eastward-pressing coast of Maine. Philip Marston bought the untouched stretch of shore and wilderness in 1880 and planned the house for his son and himself; and young John Marston built the long, low dwelling on the little promontory seventy feet above the sea and lived there as his father had dreamed. Here he brought his wife and here they reared their children. Winters might be spent in New York or elsewhere, but for the Marstons Windswept was the word that meant home.

Yet not for the Marstons only, and never closed in behind isolation as a barrier. Life shut no gates here on other lives or cultures or memories. It was as if in the very remoteness of the headland of Windswept, in the depth of the roots that were planted there, an understanding could be nurtured that would be large enough to touch humanity's universal fundamentals and to give and gather strength and beauty from all man's ages and around the world. Jan and Philomena, Caleb Perkins and Mrs. Haskell, Eileen's vivid life and Radegund's rich humanism—they were all at home at Windswept. And those who did not feel at home, like Anton, or who, like Julian, loved it and went elsewhere—well, they are part of the story, too.

Strength and beauty, understanding, fundamentals in human life—these are integrated in the whole content of the book itself. Windswept is the strongest and most beautiful novel that Mary Ellen Chase has written, the most distinguished in its innate indescribable quality and the most far-reaching in its significance. On a sterner coast than those of her previous stories, the author of Mary Peters and Silas Crockett has again wrought her sound and beautiful work of local re-creation, and not only at Windswept but far away also the spirit of place is an almost tangible influence. But as the Marstons live their lives through three generations to the eve of the present war, it must be a dull reader who does not realize that this novel weaves a broad and noble pattern of pertinent truth, set in the delicate artistry of Mary Ellen Chase's exquisitely right and lovely prose: a pattern of truth not for one time and place and group only but for America in the world.

Philip Marston, son of a family of Kennebec shipmasters, had settled in New York as a marine engineer; but when he first saw the “vast, dun headland” that he named Windswept he knew he had found the home he was looking for. “There was mystery in its very emptiness, and grandeur in its severity. Nothing commonplace could happen here, nothing mediocre or mean.” Born too late to round Java Head or tear through the roaring forties, Philip Marston was none the less a man of adventurous—because original—mind. And he showed his independence not only in his acute interest in the foreigners then thronging into the United States; he saw America as their debtor in the long run rather than their creditor, all puzzled as they now might be, and he saw the sad dangers if they found only material struggle for success. It was through this vision of his father's that young John Marston came to know the Bohemian lads Jan and Anton as familiar figures of his childhood, and Jan as the life-long campanion of rooted years at Windswept.

For the Czech peasant Jan was the child of the ancient earth, dowered with the earth's wisdom as with peasant skills. Jan and the village carpenter Caleb Perkins brought the 14-year-old boy through the swift, pitiless tragedy of Philip Marston's death. Jan's capable good sense was behind John in his determination—which so horrified his grandmother—to go on with the building of Windswept and to spend his holidays there. Jan, unlike Anton, remembered old ways and joined their values to new adjustments.

The children, Ann and young Philip, were growing up now, vigorous scions of Windswept's own vigor, walking four miles through the woods to the village school. Their lovely mother, Eileen, was still young and gay and dramatic, catching life in the net of every moment, quick in decision and insight. After years of such peerless Maine competence as had made her name a common verb in Marston usage, Mrs. Haskell had gone to marry Caleb Perkins, and Jan had brought his sister Philomena from the old country to take care of the house. A Polish farmer in Connecticut had given poor Anton a refuge in his sorry defeat. And when John Marston's work as a translator brought him the acquaintance of that exquisite French scholar, Mother Radegund, new incident touched the Marstons in the person of her niece, Adrienne. Philip Marston had been right: nothing mediocre or mean happened at Windswept. Free-spirited vitality burned deep and bright in all the people there. But grief and tragedy had come once and could come again. Ann and young Philip were out of college, ready for mature life, in 1917. In the years of peace after 1918 the younger ones were growing up in their turn—Roderick, born at Windswept; Julie, with such a different heritage. Then one March day Philomena heard the news from Prague on her eighty-fourth birthday.

“Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us,” Miss Chase quotes Sir Thomas Browne on her fly-leaf. Choosing the rightness of their free purpose, Philip and John Marston sent their roots deep—as the dowser must seek among the rocks for water—in lonely, rugged Windswept soil. But life's pure flame, as Ann Marston knows in a moment of vision, should burn not alone in the hearts of poets and saints and prophets, but in all men everywhere. And the roots planted in the soil of Windswept grow to branches that can gather diverse kinships into the idea and entity of a living America: soil blanketed through many a Winter, too, by the “snows of yesteryear.” The strength of this warm, rich, profoundly perceptive story is not that of onward-pushing force but of sureness and serenity grounded in depths of truth, and thus outgiving. The “essence and reality of life itself” is embodied in one of the finest of contemporary novels: its quest and unity.