Mr. Howells would, we imagine, be the last person in the world to suppose that, in ‘New Leaf Mills, ‘ he had produced a work in any way comparable with his own masterpieces. But, slight as the new story is, it has all the charm of his inimitable style, and exhales all the sweetness of the personality which has made him the most beloved of our men of letters. He has simply gone back to the time of his Ohio boyhood sixty years ago, and fished out of his recollections the materials f...
Mr. Howells would, we imagine, be the last person in the world to suppose that, in ‘New Leaf Mills, ‘ he had produced a work in any way comparable with his own masterpieces. But, slight as the new story is, it has all the charm of his inimitable style, and exhales all the sweetness of the personality which has made him the most beloved of our men of letters. He has simply gone back to the time of his Ohio boyhood sixty years ago, and fished out of his recollections the materials for a picture of the way in which simple people then lived on what was then the western fringe of our civilization. He tells the story of Owen Powell and his family, who finds it hard to make a living in town, buys an old mill in the country, with the aim of establishing a cooperative community of the type which then hovered before men’s minds as likely to furnish the solution of the social problem. He wishes to turn over a new leaf, and this suggests a name for the enterprise. The plan is given up in the end, and not very much happens in between—there is a house-raising, and a surly miller who resents the intrusion of the new owner, and a hired girl who mysteriously disappears, and that is about all, except a great deal of talk, tinctured with Swedenborgianism, which is Owen Powell’s spiritual stay in all his reverses. It is a book which helps us to understand our forbears of a generation or two ago, and is an undeniably veracious transcript of their life.
