Lani

by Margaret Widdemer

Lani Dwight, beautiful daughter of missionary parents in Hawaii, fell in love with Sir Mark Brent. But her affair with him ended in exile. With her parents she left for a remote Pacific island. On the boat she met Jack Chester, an English trader. She married him. Then suddenly Mark came back to her. Tense drama unfolds against the colorful backdrop of the flaming tropics.

292 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1948

About the author

Margaret Widdemer (1884-1978) was an American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (known then as the Columbia University Prize) in 1919 for her collection The Old Road to Paradise (1918). She shared the prize with Carl Sandburg, who won for his collection Corn Huskers (1916). Margaret Widdemer was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She graduated from the Drexel Institute Library School in 1909. She came to public attention with her poem The Factories (1917), which treated the subject of child labor. In 1919 she married Robert Haven Schauffler (1879-1964), a widower five years her senior. Schauffler was an author and cellist who published widely on poetry, travel, culture, and music. Widdemer's memoir Golden Friends I Had (1964) recounts her friendships with eminent authors such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Reviews

[Lynette Lark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I hated this author's writing style, I loved the story. The book is set in Hawaii (and I found the history, customs, and physical descriptions very interesting); then, in the middle of the book, the family moves to an island in the Pacific to preach the word of God to "savages" who practice cannibalism. Lani is the 17 year old daughter of a hell-fire and brimstone missionary. However, while living in Hawaii, she falls in love with Mark, an English gentleman who is married. Now here's my question: Have you ever fallen head-over-heels in love with someone who is also in love with you but who technically is not available to you so the relationship ends, but you find someone who either looks like your ex-lover or speaks like your ex-lover and you fall in love with that persona only to discover that that persona is not what you thought it to be--that it was only a cheap imitation? In a nutshell, that's the plot.