The 'Half Moon': A Romance of the Old World and the New by Hueffer, Ford Maddox - 1909

Doubleday, Page and Company, 1909. First Edition. Hard Cover. Good/No Jacket. First edition. No jacket, quarter-size stain on front board, smudges on rear board, pencil name on front endpaper. 1909 Hard Cover. xv, 346 pp. "The Half Moon, by Ford Madox Hueffer, belongs to that better sort of historical novel that refuses to purchase popularity at the cost of honest narrative and careful style. The date of the story is in the early years of the reign of King James the first. The scene of action for the English portion of the story is the town of Rye, one of the Cinque ports which had, till then, their own laws, rights and nobility, quite apart from those of the rest of England; and for the rest of the book, the action takes places on board the Half Moon, the ship in which Hendrick Hudson first came to the Island of Manhattan. It is, however, in no sense a colonial novel, for the plot concerns a certain Edward Coleman who, contrary to English law, has been exporting wool to Holland. He is betrayed by Anne Jeal, daughter of the mayor of Rye, out of revenge because he has scorned her beauty, and has chosen to marry a Dutch woman. Coleman, with the death penalty hanging over him, flees to Holland, and thence ships with Hudson to the New World, where, as tradition tells us, he was the first white man to die in the new Dutch colony. In itself the plot sounds thin and unpromising, but it has been used by Mr. Hueffer as the framework for a careful and very vivid picture of seventeenth-century bigotry, ignorance, and superstition; of the final struggle between medievalism and modernity; and of the desperate lengths to which a proud, powerful, and undisciplined "The Half Moon" woman will go in her attempt to avenge the wrongs of her slighted beauty. It is a pity that there are not more stories of the historical novel class written in this same careful and conscientious way.