The historical side of ["For My Great Folly," an] immensely entertaining novel set in England and the Mediterranean must be dealt with first despite the author's disclaimer of a factual foundation for much of it. It was a critical time: the opening years of the reign of the Scottish King of England whose fatuous attempts to wrest freedom from his subjects led, afterward, to civil war and the establishment of a Commonwealth. If you were entirely ignorant of the history involved you could take the story as sheer fiction and enjoy it throughout on that different plane. It is not unleavened fiction. A very important slice of it, for which Mr. Costain gives himself no credit, is the vivid and substantially accurate picture of King James I's corrupt court painted here with neither bias nor exaggeration. But there are other historical matters that invite inquiry.

To begin with, the book is built up round Captain John Ward, pirate, whose dossier in the pirates' "Who's Who" tells us little more than that he was of lowly birth and settled, eventually, at Tunis. While vouching for his story of Ward's piratical exploits, which, he says, "follows the historical facts closely enough," Mr. Costain admits that the picture he has given of the man himself is "completely imaginary." Apart from Ward's use, at variance with the rest of his character, of the sinister "cant" slang of the London underworld, a very sound, romantic job has been made of his career and personality. But one would like to know more exactly what degree of authenticity can be assigned to the Mediterranean sea fights so splendidly depicted here. (pp. 6-7)

[Also,] Mr. Costain's own justification for his too-flattering portrait of pretty, fascinating but utterly unscrupulous and money-mad Ann Turner would seem to have slender basis in recorded fact.

That the writer's "most serious purpose" has been fulfilled is beyond a doubt. The early part of the seventeenth century is shown here, as he aimed at showing it, in a multiplicity of colorful detail. Dress, food, travel, housing, town and country living, court life, shipboard life, the life of London's criminal class (too-over-emphasized for complete fictional enjoyment) and, most interestingly of all, the merchant world of an England growing increasingly trade conscious, are woven into a gorgeous, rare tapestry as backcloth for a beguiling drama.

And here we are on uncriticizable ground. If Ward takes stage-center as pirate, he has to halve all the romantic and many of the fighting honors with young Roger Blease, the story's narrator and as appealing a hero as book ever had. Nor could you ask for a likelier—or more delightful—heroine than Katie Ladland….

It is a very natural and a very lovely love story with as touching and heart-warming a climax as you will find anywhere in romantic literature…. Mr. Costain knows his business; and there will be no romantic-adventure lover left unsatisfied. (p. 7)