The sun., 1919-07-06
By JESSE WILLIS JEFFERIS.

h"tt, is the author of novels, stories,
poems and PLAYS. Her best known books
are her first and last-7he Quick and the
Deod and The GHOST Gdrdrn Both are
psychic and deal with the struggles between
spirits belonging To this and higher
planes.
From her father. Col. Alfred I.andon
Rivcs, a civil engineer Of Virginia, Amelie
RivcS inherited a talent for drawing,
making clever pencil sketches even before
she was able 10 read and write. After
ward She studied painting Tor two year,
i'll Paris. Her descriptive writing IL
not only colorlul and pictorial, but she
employs at times the technical terminol-
> ogy of art. as in the following:
a brace of just-shot hares dangling to
and fro had left on his clothing Il moist.
crimson stain. 1t was the highest note of
color in this study of faded blues and
browns the cotton breasts and tails Of the
poor molly cottons being the only high
lights In another passage she says:
"In the glimpsing lightning, Barbara
saw scurrying trees against the suave au-
tumn sky, ike etchngs on BLUSH paper"
Her prose and poetry are both distm-
guished for their smoothncss and musical
rhythm. which may be due To an early
musical training Always she seems to be
seeking rare combinations and cuphonlOuS
arrangements of words. When | dis
cusscd with her tins quality Of her style,
she exclaimed: "Thc possibilities of prose
writing are greater III scope and effects
than the grand organ-in fact, limitless."
Her fiction is mystical, passionate, free
spirited and capricious. 1t reflects a
spirit of independence incuIcated by her
parents, who were possibly wise in for
bidding her to attend school, where much
individuality is sometimes irOned out of
exceptional children. The love element
in her fiction is occasionally sensuOus and
pagan, never vulgar. "The great romance
is God" she says in The Golden Rose.
When the J. B. Lippincott Company
published The Quick and the Dead in
1883 Puritans were Mortified at its de-
lightfully human love scenes and dar-.
ing incursions into the world of the I'M
seem it became the most talked of book
in America. But in 1918 no one got any
thing except enjoyment from The Ghost
Garden The following passage from
Worlds End, another of her later books,
was not accounted wicked by the books
readers:
ale caught and stayed her.
And at the contact Of that young body. so
soft, SO plant, a gust of overwhelming
passion, wilder than the wild wind, seized
and rocked him; a gust of passion cruel
and relentless as are ever the rarely
reused passions of the habitually cold
The egoist in him ravened and must be
fed at any cost TO any one. Bending his
head, he kissed her on the lips-holding
her TO him until he felt her YOUNG breasts
beat against his like scared BIRDS
II.
Replying to those who have condemned
the erotic passages in her fiction, Ameie
Rives says: Books well meant, strongly
written and from clean heart resemble
mirrors, wherein every one who reads sees
his own refection-the pure, purity; the
foul minded, foulness."
Shadows of Flames, published in 1915.
exhibits realism in its portraiture of the
morphinomaniac, Cecil Chesney, "a
bloated, soulless body that had once been
inhabited by love-" He serves as grue-
some. foil for Sophy his dainty, delicately
sensitive wife.
Amelie Rives's fiction contains examples
of almost every phase of psychic phenom-
ena. Metcmpsychosis, the passing of the
soul after death into some other body, is
clearly inferred when Sophy, in ShadOus
of Flames, says to, her Italian friend,
Amaldi: perhaps in some other world
We have been friends. =. Mystery,
mystery, mystery That word kept beat