The Legend of the Seventh Virgin

Rating:
Summary: Clever
Review: Along the intelligent vein of romance ...
this is the author who got me started.

Rating:
Summary: Nostalgic Critique
Review: I don't generally read Romance novels. If I accidentally read one, then I generally dislike it. The genre and I are simply not made for each other. Legend of the Seventh Virgin is different, in that it and I have a history together. Between the ages of 8-11 I must have read this book 60,000,000 times, and when I saw it in the store I had to buy it to see if it was as I remember.

It may be that Victoria Holt is a formulaic writer. I've never read any of her other books, so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that the same impressions I had as a child came back to me very strongly. I loved Kerensa and I hated Mellyora. I totally supported Kerensa's decision about Nellyphant and would have done exactly the same. The one signal difference, I suppose, is that I felt much less dissatisfied about the ending than I did as a child (her fate no longer seeming so awful to me).

I kind of figure that anything that vivid can't be all bad.

Rating:
Summary: Exploring the Gothic...
Review: Legend of the Seventh Virgin is an interesting book in the Victoria Holt canon. I am going to name another book and author: "Cotillion", a Regency romance by Georgette Heyer, who invented that particular genre. Holt, too, invented a particular kind of modern Gothic with a strong romantic element, which was an instant success in the same way as the Regency. Anyway, "Cotillion" is a novel in which Heyer subtly subverts the traditions and mores of the Regency genre - rules she herself established! - and "Seventh Virgin" is a novel in which Victoria Holt explores the themes of the particular genre that she created. (She was influenced by Charlotte Bronte, but made the modern first-person narrative Gothic historical romance her own). I think this is what makes it so particularly interesting - Holt experiments with heroines and lead characters, playing around with their roles and our expectations, manipulating the rules she herself established (and unfortunately later depended too much upon) for this genre. Snare of Serpents, one of the better of her later books shows similar experimentation with the roles of hero and heroine and subversion of our expectations.

The book is, as we expect from Holt, interesting with the customary mysterious buildings and ruins, the intriguing characters with the dark pasts, the sense of fear and dread and the eventual, startling, unexpected conclusion. However, I did not particuarly like the last chapter, which appeared to be an after-thought, a whole other separate study, as if it belonged to a collection of short stories or in a folder of experimental jottings. Having said that, Legend of the Seventh Virgin is still a great Holt, a mysterious, slightly subversive Gothic which courageously plays a game with the author's own rules and ways. If you are studying the development of the Gothic romance through the ages, you should try to refer to this book as well as to Holt's "Mistress of Mellyn" to sufficently represent her work in this genre. It is dissatisfactory in some ways, but as a friend said:

"I thought it was an interesting twist upon the Gothic plot. The characters didn't deserve the fates that would normally befall them. So they didn't"

I think this sums it up pretty well, really. A brave and relatively successful experiment on Holt's part.