From Tangled Torment to Simple Romance

Carried by StormMay Agnes FlemingNew York: Carleton, 1880400 pagesThe first sentence holds a promise of things supernatural:Miss Ventnor is Olga Ventnor, fairest of all the beautiful women in Carried by Storm. The house, known as "the red farm-house," is just one of many rentals on John Abbott's vast estate. His home, "Abbott Wood," is far more lavish:A grand Elizabethan manor, with turrets, and peaked gables, and quaint, vine-clad stone porches, and painted windows, with stone mullions. It is new, and it looks three hundred years old at least, and reflects some of its seeming grandeur and antiquity upon its master, perhaps. And Mr. Abbott needs it. He is painfully new.A novel could be written about John Abbott.At first, Carried by Storm looks to be Olga Ventnor's story, reaching back in time to when she was a girl of ten living outside the New England town of Brightbrook. The only child of Colonel Ventnor and his fragile yet exquisite wife Mrs Ventnor, Olga is "the very last daughter…