Love on the Rocks Stories of Rusticators and Romance on Mount Desert Island
Edited by John and Kathryn Muether
$16.95
Softcover, Maine Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-934031-18-6
ABOUT THE BOOK
This anthology celebrates Mount Desert Island in its golden age, the late 19th century, when it was a summer playground for wealthy out-of-staters, and most importantly to many, a place for the rich to meet their future husbands and wives. This special era in Maine history spawned a new genre of fiction that was known as “The Bar Harbor Novel,” romance stories about the rich falling in and out of love during their summer sojourns. Dramatic and romantic, these short novels helped intensify the area’s popularity. The 11 pieces included in this collection include those by the great Constance Harrison, Marion Crawford, Edward Church, and Ervin Wardman.
REVIEWS "Love on the Rocks will give you a verbal-stereopticon view from several writers that specialized in a novella-genre known in the golden age as The Bar Harbor Novel. Much like today's romance-novel placement, they were hugely popular (and reading them, one can see why) and scorned by the snobby. I ate up the whole collection like a chocoholic on Godiva."
– The Lincoln County News
"All the great social resorts have been thoroughly exploited as backgrounds for novels, but no resort ever captured the fancy of as many novelists as Bar Harbor. In the early-day novels, there is endless ‘calling’ as well as an almost incessant ‘tinkle of the tea things.’ The cottage library is the general trysting place, but the characters also move slowly back and forth, among page-length paragraphs of scenery, between fields and streams, drawing rooms and verandas."
– Cleveland Amory, The Last Resorts
ABOUT THE EDITORS
John and Kathryn Muether’s fondness for the literature of Mount Desert developed from their frequent visits to Bar Harbor. When they are not vacationing in coastal Maine, they live in central Florida. John serves as library director and professor of church history at Reformed Theological Seminary in Oviedo, and Kathryn is the librarian of the Geneva School in Winter Park. They have four children, and this is their first literary collaboration.
ABOUT THE EDITORS