[In the following review, Feld paints a glowing picture of Windswept, Chase's novel of the Maine seacoast.]

Out of a deep feeling for a stretch of sea-bitten land, out of a profound respect for simple humankind, out of a warm and friendly erudition, Mary Ellen Chase has fashioned a glowing and lasting novel. When most of this year's crop of fiction is forgotten readers will turn to Windswept, to savor again its moods of nature, its diversity of character and its pervading philosophy of strength. To call the book a story about Maine is to give it scant stature; an ocean ever varying in color and sound embraces the miles of rugged land which Philip Marston in 1880 called Windswept, and in many ways that ocean, its strength and its sweep, represents the strength and sweep of the lives which found fulfillment there. It explained the friendship and love which existed between all the Marstons and Jan Pisek, the Bohemian immigrant who was part of their development and growth; it made possible and natural the friendships held with others, irrespective of roots or station.

“This land could be no one's but ours,” declared Jan Pisek, when his friend, Philip Marston, received the news that the isolated stretch of rugged Maine coast that held him with a deep attraction could be legally his. “It has been ours for years. It is only that we have been late to find it.” There were three of them in the dory on that summer day when Jan thus spoke without pose and without self-consciousness—Philip Marston, a widower of forty; his son, John, who was approaching fifteen, and Jan, who was in his twenties. The relationship of the three was a unique one, a matter of ten years' steady and ever-deepening growth which absorbed all differences of blood and speech.

Philip Marston had discovered Jan Pisek and his friend, Anton Karel, in the steerage of a ship coming to New York. Jan was sixteen then and Anton a year older. The quiet, scholarly American had been attracted to the two boys, and when their guardian, a kindly priest, was killed in an effort to stop a ship's brawl, Philip took their welfare upon himself. He brought them to a wife who found their strange ways and their poverty distasteful, but against her wishes Philip made them his responsibility. There was nothing patronizing in this. With them and through them he came to know an immigrants' world which was strangely beautiful to him.

In many ways Miss Chase's portrayal of Jan will recall Willa Cather's story of Antonia. The resemblance is more than one of background. Like Antonia, Jan possessed an inner strength, an integrity and worthiness of spirit that gave comfort and security to all he held dear. His devotion to his friend Anton makes a poignant subsidiary pattern to the main story that Miss Chase tells. The last incident in their friendship will be remembered among the best things in this fine book. Left alone with the body of his friend, Jan removed the coffin cover and polished the shoes of the dead man in a way he would have liked. I was a ritual recalling the days when the two of them had owned a shoe-mending shop. But this happened many years after they had separated, and Jan had become a member of the Marston household.

The day Philip Marston received title to the land he called Windswept, he was tragically killed by an accidental shot fired by the son of Caleb Perkins, the carpenter who was to build his house. On that day Jan Pisek assumed spiritual guardianship over the bereaved lad who became owner of Windswept. Inheriting his father's independence of spirit, however clothed in shyness and reserve, the fifteen-year-old boy had the strength and the purpose to go on with the plans which Philip Marston had made. In 1881, the summer after his father's death, the house called Windswept was built by Caleb Perkins.

This much of the story, while in a measure only introductory to the events which followed in the stretch of the ensuing sixty years, holds the core of the book. For it was the combination and assimilation of the spirit of Philip Marston, the strength of Jan, the changing and ever thrilling beauty of the sea and the sky and the land which made John Marston the man he was. And essentially, for all its probings into the lives of the other characters in the book, it is John Marston's story Miss Chase is concerned with. Gentle, introspective, scholarly, he stands at the head of his household, absorbing pain and laughter and tragedy with humility and grace.

His marriage to Eileen Lassiter, daughter of his father's friend, brought him happiness as a lover and a father. It is through the fruit of their love rather than through its expression that Miss Chase portrays its fulfillment. It was good to watch his children, John and Ann, at the stone fireplace in the house, on walks on the coast, in the boat they both handled with ease. To him they bespoke a permanence of kinship between himself and the deeply felt things that Windswept represented.

With rare feeling for the elusive personality of a child, Miss Chase describes the changes in the seasons and the years which brought the two to maturity. Different, they were yet the same, moulded by mental and physical environment into finely wrought and highly sensitive individuals. And not the least powerful influence in their lives was the quiet, seemingly stolid Jan, who could make no personal compromise with anything bordering on fraud but who could forgive much in the name of friendship. Because in some powerful way Windswept recalled his own native land to him, he made it for many years his solitary home through the long winter months. But when they were old enough to be left, the children, drawing strength from him, induced their parents to leave them behind when they went to New York. Philomena, Jan's sister, had come from Czechoslovakia to join him by this time, taking over the domestic part of the household heretofore run by disciplinary Mrs. Haskell. No review of this novel can stop with mere mention of Mrs. Haskell. She was a symbol and a law in the Marston household. “To haskell” something meant to finish it up neatly and efficiently. A minor portrait in Miss Chase's book, she is still one of the most vivid.

To John Marston his children's preference for the simple ways of Windswept, for its hardiness and challenge, was something to rejoice in; it gave added satisfaction to his friendship with Jan; to his sense of belonging to this stretch of colorful earth. He approved of their warm associations with the children in the rural one-room school to which they trudged in good weather and were taken by wagon in bad; he was glad to welcome to Windswept Cyril Cobb, the young school teacher who, like him, had been drawn by the peculiar strength and beauty of this isolated spot.

So broad in pattern and so deep in human evaluation is Miss Chase's story that it is difficult to pay adequate respect to all its essential details. But mention must be made of Mother Radegund, superior of Le Couvent de Saint Croix, of Adrienne Chartier, her niece, and of Julie, daughter of Adrienne. The three generations of the Frenchwoman touch three generations of the Marstons.

Mother Radegund became a friend of John Marston through his scholarly translations of French and Latin poets. Miss Chase's portrayal of the nun, wise and humorous and knowing, adds a notable portrait to the gallery of Windswept. In France during the World War Ann Marston witnessed the bravery and devotion of Adrienne to the sick and wounded, and ten years later Adrienne's daughter, Julie, born under a cloud of namelessness within the walls of her aunt's convent, became a foster child of the Marstons. By the time Mother Radegund makes the last request of her friend John Marston, Windswept is a house that has weathered much change. Death has come to it and unexpected new life.

Miss Chase brings to the telling of this story all the richness of her powers. One is caught and held by the fine penetration and analysis of spirit, the sensitive capture of the sounds and colors and moods of a Maine seacoast during every season of the year, the scholarly blending of the past with the present, and the exquisite language of one who uses words with a feeling for their rhythm and their beauty. Mature as a woman and an artist, she can see drama in other things besides personal conflict and clashes. She can see it in a man's coming to face with himself, in a man's choice between one way of life and another. For this reason, and it is an excellent one, Windswept is not so much a story of events in a man's life as a story of a splendid way of life.