Literature Relating to Staten Island 

 Blue Blood and Red^ 



Works of fiction in which Staten Island is the geographic back- 

 ground are exceedingly few. Some of the incidents in James 

 Fenimore Cooper's Water Witch are, in part, concerned with 

 the island, and F. Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan is based 

 entirely upon assumed local characters and conditions; but these 

 authors were not residents of Staten Island. In the book now 

 before us, however, we have a work of local fiction by a local 

 writer, Anna McClurc Sholl, under the nom de plume of GeofTrey 

 Corson. 



By anyone who appreciates good literary style the book will 

 well repay perusal. It is a love story, realistic, romantic and 

 verging on the tragic, with a plot that keeps one guessing from 

 start to finish. As an exposition of social conditions some may, 

 perhaps, question the moral that may be deduced from it; 

 but few would wish to have the final chapter end any differently 

 than it does. Certain of the incidents call for delicate treatment; 

 but the author was equal to the task in every instance, and the 

 only criticism pOvSsible in this connection would be that such 

 incidents should never be made an element in the plot of any 

 story. 



The aristocratic Carmichael family of the hills and the lowly 

 McCoy family of the shore region together form the web of which 

 Neal Carmichael and Patricia McCoy are the main warp and 

 woof, with lesser threads paralleling and crossing them. The 

 cold, selfish, unemotional Ada, whose code of life is to avoid every- 

 thing disagreeable and to encourage everything conducive to 

 ease and her conceptions of pleasure, irrespective of the pain 

 that others may experience as a consequence, is the disturbing 



1 Blue Blood and Red | by | Geoffrey Corson 1 New York | Henry Holt and 

 Company ] 1915. 8vo, cloth, 395 p. 



150 



