Women's Home Companions

The book trade calls it a Gothic novel. The dust jacket usually shows a terrified young woman running across a lawn, while in the background a ghostly old mansion or chateau looms menacingly through the fog. Following the chilling tradition of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, the Gothics thrust innocent and high-minded young women into gloomy households where husbands and lovers are breathlessly suspect, where hidden rooms and violent traditions abound, where hidden doors creak ominously, lights go out mysteriously, and improbable coincidences are just too much for words.

Nevertheless, it sells, chiefly to housewives who get tired of watching mindless nonsense on daytime television. Thus, while such books get little critical attention, they occasionaliy make the bestseller lists. The two latest arrivals:

MENFREYA IN THE MORNING by Victoria Holt. 256 pages. Doubleday. $4.50. Britain's Holt is one of the best-known and most successful Gothic storytellers (Mistress of Mellyn, The Legend of the Seventh Virgin). This book is about Harriet Delvaney, a poor little rich girl who is afflicted with a limp and is despised by her father because her mother died at her birth. She marries Bevil Menfrey, the handsome, tawny-haired scion of a high-spirited but impoverished family, and goes to live at Menfreya, a fortresslike mansion on the Cornish coast. Once installed, Harriet is deliriously happy--but hark: what about the beautiful, coolly poised governess who smugly glides around the joint and who soon becomes so obviously pregnant? And what about the legend of the tower dock, which stops when somebody is about to die? Aha!

COLUMBELLA by Phyllis A. Whitney. 306 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Author Whitney, a Staten Island, N.Y., grandmother of 62, fashions her 38th book about Jessica Abbott, an inhibited schoolteacher who goes to the Virgin Islands in a search for adventure. There, she is hired as a tutor and companion for 14-year-old Leila Drew, promptly falls in love with the child's father, Kingdon, and earns the undying hatred of the mother, Catherine. Somebody has to die, and so Catherine gets clouted in the face with a sea shell and knocked down a treacherous embankment. After a lot of voodoo-dee-oo and slipping about in the tropical moonlight, Jessica comes through happily, and a sudden storm conveniently takes care of Catherine's slayer. Now then, what's on TV?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.