Arctic Nurse

By Elizabeth Gilzean, ©1963

Staff Nurse Sharon Lindsay’s crusading zeal lands her in trouble at St. Mary’s Hospital—and her sudden departure for a nursing post in the Arctic seems too much of a coincidence. Though she longs to prove her worth, Sharon is bewildered by conditions in a land of ice and snow, where the greatest heat is generated by her clashes with Doctor Ross Clarke—that unbearably rude man who insists on believing the worst of her!

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I think I’ll find myself a nice long illness so you can nurse me. How about it?” 

“A pretty face is something of a treat.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Sharon Lindsay, who has always fought against unfairness since she was a small child, has gotten herself into hot water by attending a rally in Trafalgar Square organized by the unions, who are pushing for better pay for nurses. “It wasn’t that she had taken up nursing for the money attached to it,  but when it came to getting less in her pay packet than the ward maid did—well, it hurt one’s pride.” She should also be fighting against a system that dictates what she is allowed to do in her allegedly free time, but that’s a cause for another day, because after a scolding from the Matron, Sharon is sentenced to a month of night duty. 

That same evening, she attends a lecture about life in the far north, and when she comes home, she has signed up for a year’s tour of duty in the Arctic—so much for standing up for unfairness. Soon she’s on the plane, landing on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory Nunavut. There she meets the grumpiest jerk in the entire Arctic Circle, Dr. Ross Clarke, who starts out being a complete dick and never relents until the final chapters. “You’re not only a nuisance but a menace! I suppose you’re hoping to overwhelm us northern types with your glamour. You’re wasting your time, I can tell you,” he says at their first meeting, and pretty much everything else he says to Sharon is more of the same.

When Sharon arrives at Cape Mercy, where she is to be working, it turns out that there is only a first aid station, where patients are few and far between, and those that they get usually only stop over briefly on their way to get real medical care further south. Ella Emerson, wife of the local missionary and mother to six living children—one died of polio—divulges that they wanted a nurse to deliver babies (Sharon has had no experience with that) and because “if you must really know, I got desperate for another woman to talk to.” So in her time in the Arctic Sharon does very little nursing, as the two Inuit (called Eskimo in the book) patients seem to largely care for themselves in the week or two they are in residence, with few visits from doctor or nurse.

Of course, social entanglements abound. The young daughter of the French-Canadian mine boss, Ariel, is furiously jealous of Sharon the minute she arrives, as she is apparently worried that the scathing Ross might be lured away by Sharon’s bumbling ignorance. But it’s Ariel’s widower father, Marcel, who puts the moves on, and the book takes the curious attitude that women should know how to fend off gropers. “Hasn’t anyone taught you how to keep a man like that at a distance?” Ella asks after rescuing Sharon from being “pawed.” Then Sharon’s ex-boyfriend, Dr. Alistair Gaskell, who was never actually told that he’s an ex, shows up, complicating Sharon’s life further.

One of the problems with this book is that Sharon falls in love with one of the most horrid characters I’ve met in a VNRN, a man who is incessantly rude up to the page where he kisses and proposes at the same time. When Sharon tells him, “We don’t really know one another yet,” he answers, “Not know one another yet? When I’ve had you in my thoughts ever since you arrived!” as if that is in any way relevant—and then he spends the next few weeks deliberately keeping away from her, which is apparently supposed to spur her affections or deepen their relationship in some way.

The other problem, one that should not be difficult to anticipate, is the racism toward the Inuit characters. One young man, Itsawik, is the product of “a charming Eskimo custom,” in which “if an Eskimo thinks very highly of a friend, whether he’s another Eskimo or a white man for that matter, he will lend him his wife,” and now Itsawik, being half white and half Inuit, “had failed to find a place in either of his worlds”—though it is confessed that the white population won’t accept him as an equal. I will, therefore, be making a donation to Tungasuvvingat Inuit, a nonprofit service provider for Inuit people in Ontario, in a small attempt to atone for the sins of this book, or at least mine in publicizing it.

The upside to this book is that as far as armchair travel goes, it is outstanding. Elizabeth Gilzean was born in Quebec and grew up in British Columbia, qualifying as a nurse at age 21 and working in Canada before moving to England and also working there as a nurse, while beginning to write romance novels in 1958 at age 45. I have to wonder if she herself didn’t spend some time working as a nurse in the Arctic Circle, the depictions of life and the world there are so detailed. It must be confessed that the six books of hers that I have read have earned her a C+ average, though she is capable of some excellent writing, as in Doctor Sara Comes Home and Next Patient, Doctor Anne. If this book is problematic in some ways, it also is not a complete loss, even if the cover absolutely is.

Nurse Kelly’s Crusade

By Nell Marr Dean, ©1969

Beautiful Kelly Jarman was a dedicated nurse, but she was also a young woman in love. And now her heart was torn between her professional pride and her personal emotions. At Harbor Hospital in San Francisco where Kelly worked, she led the demands of nurses for better pay and greater recognition—demands that handsome intern Cass Sterling looked upon with scornful disapproval. Kelly could not stop loving Cass, but she could not desert a cause in which she deeply believed. Nor was her decision made easier when jet pilot Marty Randolph offered to take her away from this scene of heartache. It took a shattering crisis, and a dramatic hospital battle against disaster, to show Kelly the way out of her painful dilemma, and into the arms of the man who was right for her.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“What happened to that darling little girl who had bubonic plague, I didn’t hear any more after she left Pediatrics.” 

“We think it’s marvelous that you have two men chasing you.”

REVIEW:
Kelly Jarman works in San Francisco but commutes to her home in Menlo Park, here surprisingly located across the freeway from the San Francisco airport (in reality it’s 20 miles south of SFO), where she lives with her two lively roommates, while her younger sister Babs—newly divorced with a one-year-old son—lives nearby. It’s not clear what Kelly’s titular “crusade” is, because though the nurses are planning a mass resignation from their jobs to get a pay differential for nights and weekends and Kelly is going along with the idea, she’s not really involved in any part of the organization of the effort. She does crusade hard to discourage Babs, however, from opening a makeup and jewelry store, believing that Babs doesn’t have the brains or perseverance to make it work, to the point that she moves to Telegraph Hill in the city so she won’t be around to help with the bookkeeping or manning the store on occasion. Not sure if that’s the most admirable cause to be working for, but maybe that’s just me.

Neither does Kelly seem very interested in the men she is dating: airline pilot Marty Randolph, who takes her out every week or so when he’s laying over in San Francisco, or Dr. Cass Sterling, the intern who has years to go before he can start paying off his medical school debts, not to mention a likely two-year stint in the Army. When Cass tells her he doesn’t have the money to marry her, she suddenly decides “she was only a convenient date” and snaps, “Whatever made you think I was interested in marriage? What’s between us but a few dates?” So Cass, surprisingly thin-skinned, stops calling.

Meanwhile, Marty flies Kelly to Texas, where he is planning on starting a small airline company—and fickle Kelly thinks this expensive venture is a way better idea than Babs’: “With you and Dave so much in love with flying, your venture should get off to a good start. I’ll admit it takes vision to make dreams come true.” And capital, marketing plans, an accountant, FAA paperwork—Babs took a class and studied her brains out, but Kelly still thinks her sister is wasting the legacy that their (of course) dead parents left her—until a man who knows how to put up shelving starts hanging around the store. “He’s what Babs needs—a man who will never kill her spirit but who will give her only so much rein,” Kelly says—not realizing that she herself has given Babs no rein at all while constantly trying to kill her dream. Seems like it’s all about the gender of the dreamer with Kelly. And while she’s “appalled” that Babs is spending her money on a business, when Marty says he can’t marry Kelly due to lack of funding, Kelly is quick to offer Marty her own money, knowing less about his business plan and character than she did about Babs’. Kelly may not have a crusade, but she does have hypocrisy in spades!

Then there’s a huge ship accident just outside San Francisco Bay, and Kelly curiously decides that her best course of action would be to drive to Fisherman’s Wharf and get on a fishing boat heading out to rescue survivors—because a nurse with no supplies on a boat is going to be so much help out there instead of in the emergency department—the walkout has kept her steadfast in refusing to go to the hospital where she could be of real help—and who should climb into the same boat but Cass Sterling? When she tells him she thinks she’s should instead to go to the hospital to help out there during the emergency, he barks, “You little bonehead, you’re doing nothing of the sort. You’re going to stand by your convictions. You believed in resignation once. You believe in it now.” Um, because a mass casualty changes nothing, even temporarily? “She was glad that he had such a way of making things seem all right,” after his persuasive, intelligent, respectful argument.

Of course you know Cass somehow recovers from his concerns about money and proposes—guess who Kelly has been in love with all this time?—and never mind that her salary and legacy never come up as a solution to Cass’s financial problems in her conversation with him they way they did when Marty proposed—why is a single nurse’s money never a consideration to a doctor who “can’t afford” to marry when they are both financially capable of feeding and housing themselves independently?

The best thing about this book is the armchair travel in San Francisco—Gumps, North Beach, Broadway and its “tasteless” clubs, Telegraph Hill. But the main characters have no sense—even Kelly’s roommate enlists in the Air Force apparently to convince her unsteady boyfriend to propose—so if the book is a quick, easy read, the advantage there is that it will be over so much the sooner.

Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.

Nurse at the Cedars

 By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

He took Susan to his private island to be his private nurse. The old gentleman had only two weeks to live when Dr. Scott Murdock gave him a new wonder drug. Then it looked like he might pull through—and Doctor Scott and Nurse Susan began to find they had more than medicine in common. The country doctor had won the heart of the city nurse. But when greedy relatives, who expected their rich uncle to die, found him convalescing instead—real trouble rocked the little island!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Relax, Merrill. I’ve had breakfast, and I rarely gobble up nurses before lunch. You are perfectly safe.” 

“If just one more white-clad individual comes at me with a treatment tray and a needle big enough to vaccinate a horse, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions!”

“There’s two schools of thought about raising kids. One was to bring ’em up the way they ought to be; and the other was just to let the FBI handle it later on.”

REVIEW:
My copy of this book was sent to me by a reader of this blog, so the first thing I have to say is Thank you Joanne, for thinking of me! Secondly, I am relieved that Peggy Gaddis here has produced something she’s not often capable of—a good book. Here we find Susan Merrill nursing Mr. Cantrell, a rich man of 68 at a hospital in Atlanta when he decides he would prefer to go home to his estate on an island off the coast of Georgia to die—he has subacute bacterial endocarditis (and there’s an overly dense explanation of the disease that seems like it was lifted from a medical textbook for you to wade through) and has two weeks to live. Of course, he’s decided to take Susan with him as his nurse.

There she meets Dr. Scott Murdock, who is called “Dr. Murdock” throughout the book, even during tender scenes between him and Susan. He is an orphan (Susan, of course, is, too) whose education, residency and present clinic in town were all arranged and paid for by Mr. Cantrell, so since the gentleman’s diagnosis he has been burning the midnight oil researching treatments and has come across an experimental medication that might prolong his life by years, and he persuades Mr. Cantrell to try it.

Then the expected happens: Two greedy nephews and a niece show up, hoping to witness their relative expiring before their eyes and leaving them all the dough, and they are not at all pleased to find the old man is recovering! As Susan and Dr. Scott endeavor to cure the old man while protecting him from his family, they naturally and perfunctorily fall in love as the book hits the halfway point, and 14 pages later Susan essentially proposes. “I should have waited for you to propose to me, all formal and everything, I suppose. I guess I—well, sort of jumped the gun, didn’t I?” Given that they’ve only known each other two weeks, um, yes, you did, honey. But it’s actually a nice change from Gaddis’ usual method of the heroine becoming deeply hurt and insulted over her man’s inability to declare a love she has blindly refused to see.

To be honest, not much happens for a bit, though there’s a lot of flurry with the relatives and the insinuation that one of them might resort to murder, but it never comes to that—the old man conveniently drops of a stroke, as you knew he had to. Now there’s just the reading of the will, and you can probably guess the outcome of that scene, which concludes with Susan slapping the niece! Unfortunately this scene occurs only on page 102, and the rest of the book is a bit of a slog, with many characters coming and going from the house and long discussions about the various lawsuits that will follow, but though this does bring the book down somewhat, overall it is still a good one for Gaddis. The heroine really is a strong character who doesn’t metamorphose into a silly kitten the minute her man is near, and indeed when he tries to send her back to Atlanta, she refuses to go and tells him, “Hush trying to give me orders.” Gaddis does like to latch on to words—here someone is speaking “huskily” or “nodding soberly” every page of the first chapter, but she seems to have decided to reach for her thesaurus as the book progresses. Overall, it’s a satisfying achievement for Ms. Gaddis, so if you are curious to see what she can do when she’s firing on most cylinders, Nurse at the Cedars is not a bad opportunity to find out.

Send for Nurse Alison

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965
Original title: Only Time Will Tell

Alison Gray wanted so much to forget the unhappiness of her last weeks at St. Hilda’s Hospital that it seemed providential when Merlin Bleckworth asked her to come as industrial nurse in his father’s factory. But was Merlin only interested in her professional ability?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Too much agreement is as bad as too much argument.” 

“Life’s not too bad. It’s a great deal what we make it, and the unexpected turning up—like your theoretical thunderstorm—can often be a challenge and quite interesting. It depends how we tackle things.”

REVIEW:
Alison Gray was training to be a nurse when she fell hard for the young cad Dr. Graham Hoyland, who never returned her affections and ended up marrying the daughter of a rich patient. From her tragically broken heart Alison recovered, throwing herself into her studies so that now, a year later, she’s graduated with top honors and is able to work alongside Graham in the ED with nary a flutter to her healed heart. Nonetheless, when the hospital matron out of the blue tells her, “I feel it is important for you to get away for a time,” suggesting Alison take a job in a hospital far away and giving her no reason why this is “the best course for her to take,” Alison curiously is suddenly certain that this is what she should do so that “she need never again have to come into contact with Graham Hoyland or his wife-to-be.” That afternoon she tells her friend Lisa she’s resigning, with no plan for what she’ll do next, only “the strangest feeling everything in my life is being arranged for me.” How convenient!

So she and Lisa head off for a three-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—when Alison leaves her job, and when that’s over, as she’s driving out for an interview for a  job she doesn’t want, she sees a small boy fall off a cliff—he and his brother are hunting for gull’s eggs, yum yum—and rushes to his aid. Another car, “a big, opulent estate car,” pulls up, and handsome young Merlin Bleckworth bounds out, assists with the rescue, and helps drive the young victim to the hospital. From there it’s only natural that he should take Alison to dinner, learn she is a nurse, and offer her a job caring for the workers at his family’s industrial manufacturing business.

They drive to his house that night, where Alison is welcomed as one of the family—subjected to frank, heart-to-heart conversations with the housekeeper, his sister, and his mother, all of whom hint to varying degrees that Alison should stay and marry Merlin. When she doesn’t run screaming from the building, they pop her in the old nurse’s suite—the last nurse they had, now leaving to get married, lived in the house—and the next day driver her out to the factory. There she immediately aids with a young worker who has crushed his foot to a jelly, doses an anxious man with a toxic medication no longer in use, diagnoses him with too much stress from living with his in-laws who won’t let him work in their garden, and suggests to Merlin’s father Joseph, the owner of the firm, that he build housing for his factory workers. Then she flies everyone back to the family manor in her invisible jet.

This all having taken half the book to cover, now pretty much nothing else happens. We meet a new character, Dr. Ian Meltham, whom Alison immediately identifies as “a philanderer.” He incessantly pesters Alison for a date, though she never once agrees, except for the time they meet by accident in a department store, where Alison’s ability to say “no” departs her, and she is coerced into having tea with him—and the ensuing scandal requires pages of maneuvering to recover from! Merlin’s would-be girlfriend, the “tall, extremely slender, elegant girl with jet black hair and slanting green eyes,” falls for Dr. Meltham halfway through the book and is therefore completely wasted as one of those evil, scheming gold diggers out for our heroine’s man—though she does show up at the house to ask Alison in a “deadly quiet tone” if she is in love with Dr. Meltham, and Alison randomly decides the woman is on the verge of a “hysterical attack” and diagnoses her with bipolar disorder and calmly talks her out of what we are told is mania, but the description reads more as if she’s just upset and under a lot of pressure from her family to marry Merlin.

Truthfully from this scene on it seems that Alison is the one who has lost her mind, as, realizing she is in love with Merlin, “she would make no plans, no special moves, to draw him towards her,” so she plans to move out of the area that very afternoon without telling anyone because she decides she’s not going to be dumped again, a sentiment that has not haunted her one bit through the year after Graham picked someone else and all the time she’s been at Merlin’s home. Of course there’s an accident that rights everything again, but all through the book runs the theme of trust, and after this very bizarre stunt of Alison’s, It’s hard to believe anyone would ever trust her, again much less propose marriage to keep her from sneaking off. I, on the other hand, having been disappointed and blindsided by the wild leap of her otherwise sturdy character, was not sorry to see the back cover close on Nurse Alison.

Hospital of Bamboo

By Juliet Shore, ©1965 

Vivienne and Toby, nurse and doctor in a military hospital in British North Borneo, were both victims of broken romances and unwilling to become involved again. But they seemed fated to find their names linked—even though Avril Wade did her best to come between them.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“People were as they were created, and it was much more important to be likable than to be pretty.” 

REVIEW:
Vivienne Carlson has decided that “having had much of the smooth in her chosen profession a little of the rough would do her no harm,” so she has signed up for a stint in Indonesia. She’s left her young man, Graham, at home, and we know how that’s going to work out! He hasn’t written in six weeks, but when the unusually thin missive finally arrives, it’s to tell her that not only is he dumping her, he’s already married the other woman!  Well, the gossip at this small outpost would be more than she can bear in her heartbreak, so her best friend helpfully tells everyone that Vivienne has dropped Graham for Dr. Toby Chiltern! How embarrassing! Especially when the gossip reaches Dr. Chiltern’s ears! 

When she corners Dr. Chiltern to apologize, however, he does the obvious and chivalrous (and clearly self-benefitting) thing—he offers to be her beard. “If this rumor helps you at all, why not leave it? I don’t mind in the least,” he tells her, helpfully pointing out that “we will have to act it up a bit,” so they start going out on faux dates, which they both enjoy maybe slightly—and predictably—overmuch.

Now comes the big wrench, in the form of Avril Wade. She was once Toby’s fiancée, but the night before their wedding he caught her in the arms of his would-be best man and headed for the hills of Indonesia. Avril will have her man and her revenge in the end, and is so devoted to this cause that she has become a nurse and chased Toby to the Far East. I mean, that’s dedication! When she hears that a nurse in her own hospital is about to be sent to Toby’s, she trips the woman on the stairs, causing her to break her ankle, and then wangles her way into the spot. Upon arriving, she immediately arranges a date with Toby—which rankles Vivienne to a degree that surprises no one except Vivienne herself—to announce her intentions. Toby, however, remains unimpressed with Avril, but agrees to keep their former relationship a secret from everyone, including Vivienne.

Avril, the usual foxy vixen with “sultry lips and veiled, long-lashed eyes” and a vigorous work ethic devoted solely to her own appearance, then proceeds to play the entire staff like the virtuoso she is, convincing everyone that Vivienne is a driving, mean harpy. She even reads Vivienne’s diary, discovering to her delight that Vivienne and Toby’s relationship is a sham. “It was too pathetically easy to stir up strife among innocent people and be made a heroine for doing so,” she exults. Toby, however, is immune from Avril’s machinations, and soon declares his love for Vivienne—and she, amazingly, realizes she was never in love with Graham at all, and that Toby is her true love!

The pair arrange a four-day vacation on the beach, where Toby intends to press Vivienne to marry him right away after their few weeks’ courtship: “Don’t keep me waiting long,” Toby pleads, failing to mention for what exactly? But Vivienne knows: “Women have feelings, too, Toby. I want you. We’ll just have to be patient a little while longer. Although I love you I feel I hardly  know you, and I want to know you very much.”

But then pesky Graham turns up at the hotel where Vivienne is waiting for Toby to join her later that day, as they are travelling separately. Graham wants to apologize in person for destroying Vivienne’s hopes and dreams, and just happens to be in the neighborhood. Though annoyed by Graham’s egotism, she agrees to meet with him. “With luck she could get Graham out of the say, assured of her present feelings and future happiness, and then proceed to welcome Toby with all her hungry heart and its yearnings,” because of course she is not going to tell Toby that she is meeting Graham.

On his side of things, Toby is blackmailed by Avril into driving her to the same town he is headed to on his vacation, as she casually mentions that she still has Toby’s old love letters, and it would be such a shame if anyone else should see them. “He would have liked to tell Viv all about Avril and her threats, but she might wonder why the confidence had not been made sooner”—um, yeah, and she isn’t the only one—so he continues the lie by omission with the excuse, “He loved Vivienne dearly and she must be protected from his ex-fiancée at any cost.”

But what a cost! Toby and Avril show up at Vivenne’s hotel just as Graham is pecking her on the cheek in goodbye. She is compelled to introduce everyone, and now hypocritical Toby is pissy that Vivienne hadn’t mentioned the meeting. “He became furious and miserable by turns. Didn’t she know her own mind, then? I love you one minute and kissing somebody else the next.” So Toby spends most of his vacation ignoring Vivienne and frolicking with Avril on the beach, “subjecting her to humiliation never dreamed of by Graham, who had at least made a clean, sharp thrust in ending their fare.” Back at the hospital, Toby continues to play up to Avril. “It was all rather sickening. Not once had he approached her to try to patch up” their relationship, mopes Vivienne back at the ranch.

Of course there’s the usual crisis that brings the pair together again, Vivienne being amazingly generous and forgiving of the really horrible behavior of her boyfriend. But overall this is an entertaining book with some very pretty writing ("Flies merrily buzzed in, met the blast of DDT in the antiseptic atmosphere and drunkenly barged out again”), interesting characters (as usual, the villainess Avril is the most intriguing person in the book), and minimal racism (though I will be making the usual donation on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation). You could certainly do a lot worse than to spend some time in Hospital of Bamboo.

Senior Staff Nurse

By Hilda Pressley, ©1965 

Annette was confident that she could return to her old job as staff nurse at the Royal Hospital and face her ex-fiancé David without a qualm. But how would she really feel when they came face to face? Was there really ‘nothing so dead as a dead love’?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Since when was human behavior consistent?” 

“Any person’s the richer for having loved. Nothing—either time or distance—can take away the effect of love. It builds something into a person, into their character. Something permanent.”

“It’s only too easy to make all the virtues—trust, kindness, simplicity, meekness—appear like foolishness, instead of sterling qualities.”

“There’s far more to people than proteins, fats, carbohydrates and so on.”

“Time and love are strangers to each other.”

REVIEW:
A year and a half before this book opens, Annette Cochrane and her fiancé, resident anesthesiologist David Hadley, had argued over her wish to complete her training before getting married. “I don’t want my wife working. I’m earning enough for both of us,” he’d trotted out. But she’d gone anyway: “I want to feel I’ve achieved something before giving up,” she replies, already having given up “the secret ambition she had once had to specialize” as a scrub nurse. So off she goes to a hospital a hundred miles off for six months more training while he waits around for her to come home. Or not, as it turns out when she comes back that he’d been taking out chief nurse Janet Hughes in her absence. But he’d suggested they end their engagement, so she’d slipped off her ring and gone off for a year of surgery training.   

Now back at the hospital, she’s doing her best not “to fall in love with David all over again, suffer the same heartbreak.” He’s being very helpful with that, acting all cold and snippy, yet still always seems to be around for one reason or another. She starts dating the new surgeon, Andrew Knight, who seems to have fallen for her in a big way, but every time she takes him to her apartment, David is there visiting her roommate. Meanwhile there are the usual troubles with her colleagues: the chief nurse is cool and unfriendly, and one of her subordinates is deliberately sabotaging her, but Annette is ultimately able to negotiate her work difficulties. After many dates with Andrew, he eventually proposes, but she is still waffling about whether or not she still loves David, and goes “all sentimental every time he came into her mind,” deciding it’s “habit for her heart to gyrate every time he came near her or touched her.” Sure it is! So we spend a great deal of time watching Annette and David slowly drift into the painfully obvious ending we saw from the first chapter.

It’s curious that this book presents working as one of two choices: one either marries and gives up her career or becomes “a hard-bitten, career-driven woman who thinks of nothing but work and expects everyone under her to do the same.” Annette decides out of the blue, halfway through the book and after having gone to considerable trouble to maximize her nurse training, that “there were more important things in life than achieving an ambition,” thinking that “marriage can be more important for a woman than a career.” It’s an odd position for someone who was hell-bent on finishing her training at the expense of her relationship. The most irritating part of this is that in the end—spoiler alert—when she’s ready to chuck her career David replies, “My darling, you don’t have to. It’s entirely up to you. But the fact that you were willing to—” He doesn’t say what that does for him, but it made me want to throw up, and was an irritating way to end a book that had been largely only dull up to that point.  

Nurse of Spirit Lake

By Dorothy Brenner Francis, ©1975 

Ellen Ferris was aghast at her first sight of Scarlet Point Lodge. Never had Aunt Madeleine mentioned that the hotel she had recently purchased on the shores of Iowa’s Big Spirit Lake was in fact a run-down four-story monstrosity with a red tile roof and Gothic-arched Spanish belfry towers. Even more astonishing was Aunt Madeleine’s revelation that she had only four guests—really five, she carefully explained, if you counted sandy-haired Doug Cooper, the young writer who helped out with odd jobs in exchange for his room and board. But Aunt Madeleine had plans—ambitious intentions of restoring the lodge to its former graciousness—and she had hired Frank Welborn, an architect with blond hair and deeply tanned skin, to supervise the renovation. Resignedly Ellen tried to concentrate on setting up a first-aid station for the lodge’s four elderly guests. It was for this purpose that the blue-eyed nurse had come to spend the summer at Spirit Lake. And she had welcomed the invitation, because it afforded her time to ponder the problem that had arisen during her last semester of teaching at a California nursing school. Before long, however, Ellen’s problem was eclipsed by the thornier ones involved in running Scarlet Point Lodge—and in managing her own unpredictable heart. And then the odd occurrences began …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“No matter how far a guy travels there’s nowhere to look for subject matter except within oneself.” 

“Good food can distract almost anyone from unpleasantness.”

“Sincere compliments for work well done never spoiled anyone.” 

“History is a crop that sometimes gets plowed under.”

“Every place in the world is special, but life moves so fast that it takes a magician, or an artist, to make people stop and notice the uniqueness right at their doorstep.”

REVIEW:
Ellen Ferris had never wanted to be a nurse, but had been forced into it by her Aunt Madeline, who had raised her after she had been orphaned at 15. But she’d gotten her way in the end, becoming a teacher at a nursing school after she had obtained her RN. Now she’s again doing her aunt’s bidding by coming to Scarlet Point Lodge, the run-down hotel on the shores of Spirit Lake in Iowa, to serve as staff nurse for the whopping four guests at the lodge who seem to be staying all summer as well. She’s in a bit of a pickle at school: A wealthy man’s daughter is flunking Ellen’s class, and if she flunks the student, the father is going to change his mind about the endowment he’s planning to give the school. So Ellen is hoping this little sojourn away from school will help her figure out if she’d rather keep her principles or her job.

Before long strange things start happening: food is going missing from the pantry, and Ellen finds a hair ribbon on the third floor, which is closed to guests. And someone has used the rowboat! Aunt Madeleine also demonstrates some erratic behavior such as standing on the railing of the third-floor belfry and becoming too frightened to get down, not to mention staffing and stocking out a first aid station for a meager four guests when she has better things to do with her money, as her hotel is literally falling apart and the lawn isn’t even mowed. But that doesn’t seem to bother Ellen as much as the hair ribbon does.

Meanwhile there are two young men to compete for Ellen’s hand in marriage, because it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a heroine of a nurse novel must be in want of a husband. There’s Doug, a writer with a gloomy outlook—he obsesses a lot about the history of Native American massacres in the area, constantly calling Ellen’s attention to the site of this attack or that one—and he has some odd ideas: “I believe there’s a universal thought bank that’s made up of every thought and every idea that has ever existed. And I believe that each individual mind is an inlet that’s in some mysterious way connected to this huge thought bank,” he tells her, adding that he’s tapped into this thought bank, because “even if I’d never read a word about the Spirit Lake massacre, I know I would have sensed a feeling of death when I visited this area. It’s all around us.” Because no one anywhere else has ever died. She likes him anyway, but does think “there was an unrest about him that troubled her, interested her.”

The other young man, Frank Welborn, is the architect that Madeleine has hired to spruce up the hotel. He’s “a sleek type who might have stepped from a clothing advertisement in a slick magazine,” and we first meet him when Ellen discovers him in her room, allegedly measuring the space for future renovations. She dates him too, even though he uses the adjective “super” in about every other sentence, but on the plus side he’s never even heard of the Spirit Lake massacre and “never cared much for local history,” so he’s not bringing up dead people all the time. He tells Ellen to pass her student and move to New York City with him. “You aren’t afraid to try making it in a big city, are you?” Luckily he decides they should head out on the dance floor before she’s obliged to continue this “uncomfortable conversation,” but there she decides, apparently based on Frank’s smooth dance moves, that “Frank was a man a girl could build a dream around.”

When she’s not kissing boys, there’s lots of other action at Scarlet Point Lodge for Ellen to get involved in. There’s a huge storm in which the 77-year-old guest decides to go for a walk and a tree falls on him, giving him a head laceration, which Ellen treats with sedatives and then sends him off to bed, possible concussion or brain bleed be damned! The fireplace chimney gets blocked and smokes out the ground floor, causing one of the guests to have a severe asthma attack and vows to check out immediately. “Madeleine Ferris is an idiot,” he pronounces, having only just arrived at a conclusion that would have been painfully obvious from the first minute on the place. But Ellen shows who the idiot is when she distracts him from his idea with a buttered muffin. Then she finds a runaway girl, 12-year-old Lori Wilde, who has run away from a foster home while her mother serves six months in jail for shoplifting food. Lori, intent on not being seen, is shining a light around the dock and singing along to a radio in the middle of the night when Ellen timidly ventures out to see who is making all the ruckus. Lori might not be as dopey as her hiding skills make you think, as right away she asks Ellen, “Why are you bothering to ask me dumb questions?”

Janey van Allen, the young woman who Ellen caught cheating on the exam, turns up after driving 1,500 miles and tells Ellen that the reason she cheated on the exam, though she is otherwise an A student, is that she had been caring for her 7-year-old sister with severe tonsillitis for the previous three days and hadn’t had time to study. She begs for forgiveness and swears she will never cheat again. It’s curious that this story hadn’t surfaced weeks earlier, at the time of the actual incident, but hard-hearted Ellen is unimpressed. Then Doug proposes, but he’d just gotten a letter from someone named Julie Jackson and doesn’t explain it to Ellen, and then she sees Frank holding Janey’s hand and there’s lipstick on his cheek, so there go both of her men, as easy as they came. Only a hotel fire will put everything to rights!

Honestly, you’d swear Ellen is jinxed the way one calamity after another happens to her. She herself is a confusing character, as she is determined to do the “right” thing by expelling her student from school but herself repeatedly fails to report the runaway child, leaving the girl to sleep in the woods for days. She also doesn’t seem to have much sense as she navigates the world, freaking out about Doug getting a letter from a woman and swooning for the asinine Frank. Overall this book and a number of its characters, Aunt Madeleine in particular, are a bit perplexing. Failure of logic and inconsistent characters are two of the most common problems VNRNs have, and Nurse of Spirit Lake has both in abundance, so you might want to save your time and pick a different book.

Nurse at Ste. Monique

By Juliet Armstrong, ©1966

That foggy London morning, when someone tried to snatch her handbag, was to have far-reaching consequences for Maura O’Shea, sending her winging across the seas to a new life in the sunny West Indies. It was indeed a far cry from the renowned St. Matthew’s Hospital in London to the little nursing home at Ste. Monique, but Nurse Maura was to find that the emotional problems facing her there were far, far greater than ever they were in London.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
Maura O’Shea is the Irish stereotype, red-haired and feisty; “You could deal out a very smart box on the ear, if you thought a chap deserved it,” she’s told. She is working in London when right there on the first page her handbag is stolen and she is knocked to the ground. “A tall man, carrying a suitcase, strode over to her and lifted her to her feet with his free arm, firmly but gently, as though she were a precious piece of china.” Do we think this gentleman makes an appearance on the last page of the book as well? We sure do! His name is Paul Lasalle, and he is in town on business for his plantation (yeesh) in the Caribbean. Because the robber is soon nabbed, he is required to come back to town to testify at the trial in a few weeks, so the pair go out regularly before he heads back home. But his brother, Claude, is also in town—and he’s a more social fellow, frivolous with his emotions, soon taking her out on a regular basis and calling her “darling,” which makes Paul’s eyebrows rise concernedly when he returns, and he’s a bit too brusque for Maura. “Was it that he suspected her of setting her cap at Claude, and regarded her as on a lower social level than the Lasalles?” 

But Claude has to return to the Caribbean soon, and Maura tells him she’s not going to see him any more—so he shows up and proposes marriage. It’s arranged that she will sail to the Caribbean in a few weeks, and at the first stop she gets a telegram telling her to get off there, though she’d planned to finish her trip at another island, and when she steps off, she’s met by Paul, who tells her that Claude has gone back to his ex-wife—whose existence surprises Maura. When Paul tells her he will pay for her to fly back to London on the next flight, instead of being grateful, she’s rude: “You’re in a great hurry to get me out of the island! I might have the plague!” she snaps, not at all grateful that he’s trying to help her out of a huge jam. Instead she takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job at a nursing home, but Paul warns her that the nursing home is on the verge of going bankrupt, because although it’s a profitable business, the owner, Mrs. Martin, took on a lot of debt to finance its startup and is having trouble paying her creditors as well as the business expenses. Again, is she thankful for the tip? No, she is not!

Yet he keeps popping around to see her or take her to dinner, and they inevitably squabble, mostly about his concerns about the men she is dating—his motivations transparent to everyone except Maura, who thinks, “How hard and distrustful he could be, how lacking in charity”—although one time when they are driving to dinner and she has fallen asleep in the car she dreams that he gently kissed her lips … and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Maura decides “to part with him finally and forever, would be utterly unbearable”! This is one of the worst sorts of plot twists, completely inconsistent—even if completely predictable—with the character we have followed in the last hundred pages. Yet she still argues with him at every turn, and then does her best friend Phyllis a bad turn when she dates her boyfriend and he thinks he’s fallen in love with her. Only a series of crises with both Paul and Phyllis—again, completely predictable—sort out everyone’s true feelings, although one of the crises, which lands Paul in the hospital, is so bizarre it’s hard for me to imagine Paul would ever look at Maura again.

In the meantime, Maura is being quite rude to a coworker who, it must be confessed, is not a nice person, though she should know even at 22 that she’s not helping the situation. Oddly, she is reluctant to visit Paul in the hospital but finally goes a week or two later, “cost her what it might in pride,” though it’s clear to me that she owes him a lot more than a visit—but he’s left the hospital days ago. She meets the nurse who had cared for him there, and now she’s stupidly in agonies that Paul has fallen for his nurse, wondering if she “was the reason for his silence”—and never mind that she hasn’t reached out to him at all, either, so maybe he’s wondering about her silence, but “she was too proud to ring up the Lasalles, as she would have loved to do.” Maura is her own worst enemy, and it’s a little difficult to understand what all the men see in her. And now she’s decided to leave the Caribbean in two weeks, another smart decision. Then her feud with her co-worker lands her in hot water at the immigration office, as she’s been working without a permit, and is told to leave the island the next day. What will happen next?

The obstacle with this book is that Maura is a stupid and not very likeable person. She deserves little of the good that happens to her and all of the bad. But the writing is good, even if I found nothing for the Best Quotes section above, and the other characters in the book are interesting. If you can tolerate a very predictable plot (but then, aren’t all VNRN plots very predictable?) and a foolish heroine, it’s not a bad read.

Starring Suzanne Carteret, R.N.

By Diane Frazer
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1966
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

When, almost by chance, Suzanne Carteret was summoned as a consultant on a television series devoted to nursing, it seemed to her a wildly exciting prospect. The entertainment world was a madly glamorous one and she was eager to penetrate it. But it proved far different from what she had imagined. Soon she found herself sucked into a vortex that threatened to carry her far over her head. Things began happening more quickly than she had ever imagined possible, and for a moment it even began to look as if she might be swept into a whole new career. Would it turn her head? Could she abandon nursing, for which she felt such a genuine vocation? And what about young Doctor Clive, with whom she had thought herself in love? The decision was hers. Or was it? Everything moved with a rapidity that made her feel sometimes that she no longer had any control over her life!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Never buy a sling chair, Ted. I found bones where I never knew I had them before.” 

REVIEW:
Picking up a book written by Dorothy Fletcher, here under her usual pseudonym, gives me a little frisson of excitement. Maybe it’s the Harry Bennett cover illustration—he seems to have done most of her books—a little cutting edge, a little weird. Maybe it’s anticipating the saucy repartee that will inevitably sparkle from the yellowed pages. Maybe it’s meeting another independent, strong woman who knows her mind, most of the time anyway, who will be a treat to spend time with. Here we have all that—and if the plot isn’t Ms. Fletcher’s finest, well, you know it’s still worth the hours. 

Suzanne Carteret, R.N., is our nurse heroine. She works on the neurology floor for a Manhattan hospital, so it’s not clear why she and neurosurgery intern Dr. David Clive care for so few neurology patients. But who cares? She and her feisty roommate Dorcas double date with David and his intern friend Pete, going out for spumoni and beer on Saturday nights, and why not? They’re poor, so they can’t afford Sardi’s. But in the first chapter, Suzanne meets a man who can, Ted Binghamton, an associate producer for a new TV show, “Women in White.” It’s about nurses, and when he and a few of the actors come to the hospital to learn a few things about it on background, Suzanne shows them around. By the end of the hour, Ted is smitten. He calls her up and asks her out, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s caught her at a time when she’s feeling a little disenchanted with her beloved.

David Clive is a kind, compassionate, hard-working young intern, putting in tons of hours and breaking dates at times because he’s offered to scrub a case that’s unexpectedly going to the OR late. But gosh, all he talks about is the hospital, and medicine, and patients! Even on their one big splurge date, when “she wanted to talk idly and dream,” he doesn’t. “Let’s not talk about the hospital, she silently adjured him. Oh, David, forget about the hospital for once. Talk to me. Just to me, please.” But she forgets to speak the words aloud, and when he doesn’t read her mind, she snaps at him, and they have a little fight. Then she starts noticing that he does seem to have a one-track conversation every time they’re out. “There they sat, David and Pete, absorbed in abstractions, oblivious to herself and Dorcas, oblivious to the passing scene. Beyond lay the world, and the world was more than medicine. The world was light and laughter and gaiety and frivolity. When you were twenty-three years old, as she and Dorcas were, laughter and frivolity were things you wanted. Things she wanted, and wanted badly.” Unfortunately she doesn’t get them with David, nice as he is.

So she agrees to go out with Ted, and he takes her to Sardi’s! He invites her to the TV studio, and there she befriends a young actress, Virginia Clegg, who is on her last dime, and if she doesn’t do well with this role, her dream of acting is over! Unfortunately, the aging actress on the show has got it in her head that Suzanne should play the part instead of Virginia. The back cover blurb notwithstanding, Suzanne has almost no interest in becoming an actress, and repeatedly rebuffs the idea. But she does keep saying yes to Ted, who keeps asking her out on fabulous dates. We know that seeing multiple people isn’t really wrong in this era—men who are engaged are constantly kissing and even grabbing other women in vintage nurse romance novels—but she hasn’t told David that she’s dating Ted, and she’s wondering if maybe Ted is more interesting than David.

I think that’s really all I can say about the plot, which as I hinted above is not very complicated, without giving away the story. But it’s still a good story, replete with Fletcher’s trademark witty dialogue, and in addition it is also an homage to being a young woman loose in Manhattan, with lovely passages describing the streets and the passersby in the park and how it all makes you feel alive. It’s clear Dorothy Fletcher did love New York; she lived there from her early 20s until she married in her late 40s and moved to Florida. If we never get to experience life in the city for ourselves firsthand, we’re lucky we have Dorothy to show it to us, and I’m only sorry that of the 16 nurse novels Dorothy wrote, I have only two left.

Mary Ellis, Student Nurse

By Hope Newell, ©1958 

Mary Ellis Stebbins, the delightful heroine of A Cap for Mary Ellis, who left her home in New York’s Harlem to attend a newly integrated nursing school upstate, is sure her second year of study will bring many problems. It does, but they have little to do with racial conflict—for the most part, they concern her additional responsibilities as a second-year student. And then there is the entirely welcome complication of furthering her friendship with a nice young intern!

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I think I’ve finally persuaded her that there are more important things in life than comfort.” 

“If you youngsters talked less about managing patients and more about understanding them you’d make a lot more headway.”

“How annoying patients can be when they try to make things easy for nurses.”

“Lots of girls take up nursing with the idea of being angels of mercy to the sick and suffering and all but idolized by their grateful patients. Then they meet up with a few Miss Swopes and find out that even angels are not always appreciated. Before they know it they’ve forgotten their high ideals and begin to think of nursing as just a way to make a living.”

“It wasn’t necessary to answer insulting people.”

REVIEW:
Mary Ellis Stebbins is returning to Woodycrest Memorial Hospital for her second year of nursing; she was one of two Black students admitted the year prior when the school integrated, and a third Black woman is starting this fall as a new student. The incoming class is introduced to the second years, and each is given a “little sister” to mentor, so immediately we have 14 nursing students to keep straight—not helped by the fact that they are all given fairly stupid nicknames. Mary Ellis, for example, is called Tater, because last year she was posing as a patient when another student was practicing washing, and was told that the amount of water she was using wasn’t enough to clean a potato. And so it goes for 13 more young ladies. 

Each incoming student has some handicap to overcome—some are just poor with scraped-together wardrobes, but Claudia Orcott had a “coasting accident”—not really sure what that is, sledding, possibly—and disfigured her nose; even though grumpy plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers refuses to do plastic surgery “merely for cosmetic reasons,” Mary Ellis decides she’s going to ask him to fix Claudia’s horrific appearance, and then we don’t hear from Miss Orcott or about this again until the end of the book.

Before long intrigue blooms when in one afternoon a gold rosary and two other students’ money go missing. What a scandal! “As long as every one of our class is in on the secret, I reckon we won’t have any trouble keeping it from the rest of the school,” Mary Ellis suggests with apparently genuine sincerity. Well, the mystery is solved by one of the students—not Mary Ellis—who would give Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple a run for her money. Now the book is half over and we only have 75 more pages to go.

As a second-year nursing student, Mary Ellis is the only person staffing an entire ward on the overnight shift. Astonishingly, the only “horrible experience” she has is when an elderly patient with a fatal disease dies and she does not realize this when she checks on him in the morning before going off duty. But time goes on, “gradually dulling her misery” over this terrible “mistake,” and soon we’re three-quarters through the book, when four new interns come to the hospital, and one of them, Dr. Harris, is Black! Which means that “each of the three colored girls was hoping that Dr. Harris would seek her out and ask her for a date.” That was how it was in the day, unbelievable as it is now.

Now we have a whirlwind of crises for Mary Ellis to right. It turns out the plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers and his wife are hoping to adopt a child but are considered too old. You will not be shocked to hear that Mary Ellis discovers a soon-to-be orphaned boy in the hospital; his mother has “an incurable disease” and “had not long to live.” She manages to rescue the boy, Sammy, when he nearly strangles on the restraining straps tying him to his crib (!!), and introduces Sammy to Dr. Meyers—a week later everything is all settled, and Mary Ellis then asks Dr. Meyers to have a look at Claudia’s nose, which apparently no one has bothered to do until now, though several discussions among the staff have occurred during the school year. All that remains is for Mary Ellis to wangle a date with Dr. Harris and pass her exams and we can close the book.

One of this book’s flaws is that it gets too heavily into details. For example, there’s a pages-long discussion of possible ways Claudia might first glimpse her new nose, and more pages discussing the machinations behind the organization of the Capping Ceremony; there are also more than 60 named characters to try (and fail) to keep track of (not to mention their nicknames). Furthermore, for a nursing student, we don’t see much of Mary Ellis outside the dormitory. She is constantly dwelling on the fact that her teachers tell her she is “not very hot in making decisions and that kind of thing.” But her daily life as a nursing student is almost completely ignored and we rarely ever see her at work, when she is either burning the toast or saving a toddler from strangulation. The fact that Mary Ellis is one of the first Black women accepted to her school and is likely subjected to racism is only rarely or tangentially discussed, and it seems that the author of this book was actually white. Author Rubie Saunders is widely (and as far as I can discover, appropriately) credited as being the first Black author of romance novels featuring a Black heroine, but here we have a curious example of a white author writing a Black heroine. I am curious to know how and why this book came about, but I’m guessing this mystery will never be answered; if only we could get Mary Ellis’ classmate on the case.

The Prodigal Nurse

By Teresa Hyde Phillips, ©1936 

Celia Landis looked across the dingy table at Tony Starr, whose fine surgeon’s hands were toying nervously with a coffee cup. “No, Tony,” she said slowly, “I’m not ready to be married yet. I … I haven’t really lived.” And Tony, who knew she was the best nurse St. Martha’s had ever had, smiled into her impetuous young eyes, and was silent, thinking, “You’ll be back soon enough!” So Celia tried life—a life not bounded by nurse’s rules or constant sacrifice, and with the help of suave Carlie Daklin she became the best photographer’s model in New York. But what of happiness? Celia had to choose between Carlie—her kind “angel” in this new and giddy world and Tony—the symbol of a life she had vowed to abandon. Which would it be?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“The only thing wrong with you is astigmatism.” 

“I have had dozens of nurses it seems to me in these last weeks and I had begun to believe that your profession begets none but worthy women who look like nothing but disasters on land and sea.”

“Women were such egotists, they thought that what they said and did and what happened to them mattered so much.”

“I’m a Harvard man. I wouldn’t get myself seriously shot outside a lady’s boudoir.”

“One’s mind said, ‘One must not think, nor remember, nor hope.’ Champagne said, ‘Leave that all to me.’”

“Character is a better bet than glamour any day.”

“Women have some silly romantic idea about surgeons. Completely uncalled for. They have a job, like the rest of us.”

“Men! They let you down. For chivalry, for kindness, you went to women.”

REVIEW:
Celia Landis is “twenty-one, beautiful and free!” She’s just graduated from nursing school, and Dr. Anthony Starr, right there on the first page, is “offering her the prisonhouse of marriage, proffering the ball and chain.” Good girl, she turns him down flat. “I don’t believe in marriage,” she says. “I don’t want to be tied down. I want to see things, to do things, to find out for myself. I want to be on my own.” The author, interestingly, doesn’t seem to be on the side of her heroine, as Dr. Starr, who “knew that only in bonds is there freedom,” is smiling condescendingly at Celia. 

It seems that Celia thinks she has made a mistake by becoming a nurse. She was forced into it when both her parents died her freshman year in college and there was no money to pay for her education. Now she has no other option but to work  to support herself, though she is not interested in dedicating her life, “as that of his wife must be, to illness” and is hoping to find another career option. “I’m not tough,” she tells him. “I want the beauty and the fun of life.” Of course, she is nonetheless “an exceptionally good nurse,” as VNRN heroines, reluctant though they may be, usually are.

She loses her first two cases because men in the house insist on forcing themselves on her, and the head of the nursing registry of course blames Celia for this. “If there was anything to be deplored in a nurse, it was beauty. Beauty. Detestable quality, leading only to trouble,” the woman thinks. In the depths of despair that she will never get another nursing job, Celia runs into Tony and his boss, Dr. Alderdice, and the pair take her to lunch. Afterward, as Celia tries to tell Tony about her fears, he dutifully proposes again, though Celia thinks he does not mean it and decides she’s not sure who he really is. “She felt that she no longer had any hold on him. None whatsoever.”

Then Carleton Daklin, the husband of one of her patients who had fired her, calls her up and offers her a modeling job. He is the head of an advertising agency and is looking for a nurse to pose in a series of ten ads for the National Hygiene Council, and the pay is $1,000—an enormous sum in the wake of the Great Depression, when a furnished two-bedroom apartment on East 43rd Street costs $120 a month. She takes the job, and when Tony calls her to say he’s taking a trip to the West Indies to do germ research, she tells him of her triumph. He is happy for her, but less so when he hangs up the phone, though he berates himself for his idiocy. “Had he for a minute thought she would say to him: ‘Tony, my darling, nothing that happens to me is of the slightest interest, there’s only you and your life.’” Now he is the one thinking he has lost Celia, but “he knew Celia, he thought, better than she knew herself.”

Then United Models calls, and soon the phone is ringing off the hook. Eventually Tony comes home and phones her, and he’s dismayed with her new life. “What had this girl thrown over? A real job, the greatest thing in the world—medicine,” he thinks, again frustrated that she did not ask him how his trip had gone. She goes out to dinner with Tony and enjoys his companionship, believes “there was no one like him, no one who could touch him in any way.” But he again sneers at her new profession with “amused malice” and tells her she should not have given up nursing so soon. “As a nurse, Celia Landis was a bust on her first two tries and only because she let herself think of herself as a bust,” he says. She is torn between her desire to live her own life and her attraction for him, but chooses the former, though she’s not certain for how long: “When she came to him she must come with everything—heart and mind and with every intent.”

When Tony walks her home, Carleton Daklin is waiting for her in her apartment—the first time Celia has seen him since he got her the modeling job—but Tony does not believe it and stomps out, and when Celia calls him to explain, he is cold. So she starts going places with Carleton, becoming the It Girl of Manhattan. “The emptiness Tony left was teaching her things. It was enlightening.” But one late-night party goes awry and a man is stabbed. Celia is the only one who can keep a cool head, not surprisingly, but the scandal lands her in the tabloids with a not-so-gentle assist from a couple other women in Celia’s circle who do not have her heart of gold—just as the sordid affair has made her realize she wants out of the glittering birdcage, the same day an offer to become chief nurse of the OR at the hospital where she trained arrives, which is withdrawn the next day. Tony runs to her house when he hears the news, but Celia, wounded to the core, can only snarl, “To tell me exactly what to do—is that your idea of friendship?” It’s more than a little true, but Tony says good bye and leaves, Celia thinks for good.

There are the usual crises before Celia is brought back to her man and nursing career, and if the ending wasn’t quite the complete perfection I wanted it to be, this is still a really lovely book. The writing in this book is sparkling: “Behold Miss Celia Landis, R.N., diploma summa cum laude, drilling through the traffic of Manhattan in a taxi which looked like any other taxi but which, if the world had eyes, was a jumping-off place from which one flung oneself into the fun of accomplishment.” It’s a thoughtful book full of philosophy about life and what is important, but not overly intellectual. It’s not hard to feel what the characters are going through, and how Celia has grown over the course of the book. If for most of this book she is not working as a nurse, she is still at heart a nurse throughout. My only real beef is that the ending does not clearly give Celia the strength she has earned from her experiences, and it’s not quite certain how she is going to live up to her new character. But that aside, this is a thoroughly delicious book, and if you can track down a copy for yourself, the effort will be worth it. 

Nurse in Danger

By Maisie Greig, ©1955

The steward laid a small table for them in the cabin and set silver and a pink-shaded lamp upon it: the white cloth reflected the soft light so that suddenly Jane felt she was in some exclusive nightclub. It really was very romantic. As the boat dipped gently she could see through the porthole the silver-crested waves, the moonlight cutting a path through the dark waters … but how could one feel romantic, when dining with a man who obviously intended to murder you at the first possible opportunity?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“You talk as though you were a Commie.” 

“If you don’t have a pretty fair opinion of yourself, what’s the good of going on living?”

“You have spunk, Jane, as well as a fertile imagination, and those qualities I admire in a woman. That and a nice little body.”

“You lack complete understanding of other women, Jane. They like to be hit about, they like to grovel. It’s the slave complex.”

“Perhaps in the last analysis you can take anything for yourself, it’s only when you see others punished and humiliated before your eyes you finally revolt.”

REVIEW:
Jane is another orphan nurse who has landed the lucky job of caring for a wildly wealthy young widow, Elsa Spiegal. Well, mostly she’s just a companion, but “in case she had another of those wretched heart attacks she wanted Jane to be along.” So Jane relocates from England and follows Elsa everywhere: “the Colony, Sardis, the Algonquin, the 21 Club.” And she’s hot, too! “She had slim and shapely legs, one of the reason many of the weary habitués of the Stork Club or the El Morocco half turned in their chairs and watched her samba.” Which unfortunately isn’t working out well: “That may have been one of the reasons why Mrs. Spiegal seemed to have turned rather cool towards her lately, almost to resent her.”

Or maybe it’s the fact that Professor Dick Creswell seems to like her. “Reputedly he was a mineralist and geologist of distinction,” but he had also inherited a lot of money and is hosting this fabulous party on his yacht. But instead of flirt with Dick, she is forced to listen to Mrs. Palmer cry, because her three-year-old was kidnapped more than two weeks ago, and no one at this silly party cares at all! They don’t: “We’re all very sorry for her and all that, but she is becoming a bit of a pest,” snorts Dick, earning his name. But Jane is able to shrug off his callousness and accompany him to his cabin where he shows Jane and Elsa his jewelry collection. Elsa, “reputed to have one of the finest collections of diamonds in the whole of the United States,” exhorts Dick to lend her a diamond watch for an exhibition, and then casually details her entire security arrangement, including the fact that Jane knows the combination to the safe and will be home alone for a week while Elsa is away. Now Jane demonstrates more sense, appreciating an “atmosphere she’d been conscious of when she’d first stepped on to the yacht, a disturbing, even a frightening undercurrent of suspicion, it might even be danger.” Well, we know it’s danger, since it says so right there on the cover!

She meets a young seaman on board who ridicules the other guests, pointing out their callousness toward others, Mrs. Porter being a case in point, and Jane reluctantly agrees—well, they’ve been so kind to her! He’s caught talking to Jane by Dick, who tells her that the man is an attempted thief whom he has hired in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow with hard, honest work. Then he tells her that Elsa is wildly jealous because he is attracted to Jane and kisses her in the moonlight, the cad. Now the young innocent nurse is tortured about her own feelings for him, and his for her, when we savvy VNRN readers know the truth! Guess who enters Elsa’s apartment days later on the aforementioned day when Jane is there alone, sporting a small automatic pistol? He empties the safe, and kidnaps Jane, making it look like she herself was the thief. “Her only hope of fighting him was to pretend to acquiesce and, the chill though struck into her heart again, her only hope of living.” He drags her on board his yacht again, setting sail for who knows where? There she meets the sailor again, and he scorns her as a cheap tramp who has come on a cruise unchaperoned with a man she’s just met. She doesn’t dare to set him straight since Dick has suggested that she will “be a good girl” or be killed, and she interprets this as not telling anyone she’s a prisoner.

The seaman does warm to Jane, even kissing her before she even knows his name, and enlists her help in a scheme. He somehow manages to make Dick fall down a staircase, breaking his arm, and Jane injects him with some drug that knocks him out for 24 hours. While he’s out, she pokes around in his room and finds a child’s book that she recognizes as belonging to poor Mrs. Palmer’s kidnapped daughter Sally! Now we have question marks sprinkled across every page like ants at a picnic. They’re usually stupid questions Jane is asking herself repeatedly, though if she gave things an actual minute of thought she could likely figure out the answer. Now that Dick is her patient, though, he’s a lot more sympathetic toward her, and she convinces him that she’d been casing Mrs. Siegel’s jewelery collection a lot longer than he had, and he owes her half his profit from the heist. And it turns out that Jane is quite the actress! “He was beginning to be afraid that there might come a time when his emotions might interfere very seriously with his cool judgment” when it came to Jane.  Then she’s off to hide behind the life boats with Jaspar, kissing him “in the throes of her first big love affair.” That was fast! “They were in grave danger of their lives, but they were young and they were in love, and for that moment nothing else seemed to matter.”

We do get into some interesting philosophical discussions regarding wealth and its distributions, ideas that have more relevance in this day and age. “Why should a stupid woman like Elsa Spiegal have some of the world’s best jewels?” asks Dick. “What has she done to deserve them? What has she given to the world?” He, working as a professor, “contributed much to the world’s knowledge,” but had only a “pittance.” I have to admit I agree with his position—tax wealth, not work!

More philosophy ensues when a man is thought to have attempted to signal a passing ship, and Jaspar is ordered to throw the man overboard to the sharks. Now Jane is arguing with herself because she is still in love with Jaspar. “What a madly illogical thing love was,” she thinks. “Sometimes you hated yourself for living, and yet there it was, the strongest force in life that throbbed through your veins and blood. It couldn’t be killed by disillusion, however bitter; and while you despised yourself there was something in your heart that still sang with joy.” I don’t think love is quite as immortal as she would make out, otherwise the divorce rate might be a bit less than it is. But Jane seems to have some odd ideas about love; in the climax of the book Jaspar is rather vicious to several of the villains, but Jane decides that Jaspar is a “savage brute,” but “Savage brute or not, I’d die if I wasn’t going to be married to him!” He shows up at just that moment and she tells him she thinks he’s a brute, “and now hgis hard, blunt-fingered hands gripped Jane’s shoulders. ‘I’ll show you how much more of a brute I can be when I’m married to you, my girl,’” he answers, and shakes her. Stunningly, she neither runs screaming nor calls off the engagement, but says, “I don’t care if you beat me up every day, so long as you keep on loving me.” Just wow.

Overall the writing is engaging, though it does indulge in way too many rhetorical questions. The book’s biggest flaw is that Jane as a character is utterly bipolar. One minute she is coolly lying her head off to get out of a dangerous situation with the Professor, and then she’s shrieking hysterically during an escape in which the slightest sound could get them caught. Her over-the-top feeling for Jaspar based on a total of ten minutes in his company is completely unbelievable, and then when he is increasingly proved to be alarmingly domineering, her unswerving devotion to a future as an emotionally if not also physically abused wife is baffling. Author Maysie Greig’s lovely Doctor’s Wife had given me high hopes for her work, but now three additional books all written in the 1950s and lacking that book’s charm makes me think that early work, written in 1937, exhausted her genius. There seems to be another half-dozen nurse novels by Ms. Greig, so time will tell, but I’m not making any bets they’ll get much better.