FOREVER AMBER: A Review

Forever Amber, which sold 3 million copies during the first year of its publication (1944), and went on to become a bestseller in 16 countries. Kathleen Winsor's story of an English adventuress who becomes one of the mistresses of Charles II was banned in Boston as "obscene and offensive." The Massachusetts attorney general listed 70 references to sexual intercourse, 39 illegitimate pregnancies, seven abortions, 10 descriptions of women undressing in front of men, and 49 "miscellaneous objectionable passages."

Amber St. Clair is the illegitimate child of unmarried aristocrats, born during the English Civil Wars of 1640-50. Raised in the English countryside she manages to sleeps her way to London, where she is abandoned by her lover, Lord Bruce Carlton - pregnant and alone at age sixteen. She then sleeps with several men who pay for her favors, marries a cad who steals her money and ends up in prison. She sleeps with a charming rogue to get herself out of prison, becomes a thief, then an actress, a mistress of Charles II and then marries a rich elderly man. Upon his death, she is left a wealthy woman. At this point we are not even at the halfway point of the book.

Forever Amber has obvious plot similarities to Gone with the Wind - a civil war, a dashing privateer /blockade runner, a determined heroine named for a color, the contrast between a corrupt society and its slaves and servants.

Reading it today ... your reaction is mainly ... *yawn*. First of all, Amber is nothing more than a selfish, self-centered shallow social climber who beds, weds and beds man-after-man to obtain her goal of wealth. For the one man she does love, Lord Carlton (privateer), Amber freely two-times her husband in order to have a brief sexual affair with her come-and-go lover.

And then we get to the section of the novel that most people think as the redeeming section of the novel: the plague that sweeps across England. When Lord Carlton is infected, Amber heroically throws caution to the wind (gone with the wind?) to care for him, and ignored her own safety. When he survives, he decides that although he loves Amber, Carlton could not lower himself to marry her; he leaves to establish a tobacco plantation in Virginia.

Most people see Amber's heroic efforts during the plague (and later the Great Fire of 1666) to be her character's redemption. I beg to differ. Since Lord Carlton ultimately abandons her (again) I think it is merely just desserts for her past behavior. Unlike her more famous counterpart (Scarlett O'Hara) whose behavior, while self-centered, is more broadly a way to protect her family after disaster and an attempt to regain what has been lost. Amber is a nothing more than an opportunistic whore. The reader never once cares if she is successful. In fact, this reader kept hoping that more misery would heaped upon the unlikable Amber.

However, the book is well-written, and the sections that deal with the plague and Great Fire are justly famous for their harrowing and accurate historical description, but by the time you get to those sections (past page 500) it is too little too late.

BIBLIO SAYS: Avoid like the plague. :-)

Companion Read: Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
Restoration by Rose Tremain