It will be my assumption that writers of Miss Gordon's vision have but one subject. On one level hers is in the fullest sense traditional and historic. By this I do not mean what is commonly understood as the "historic novel": that is, the costume piece or the arbitrary use of certain historic periods dramatized Caroline Gordon 1895–1981 © Hans Namuth 1983through crucial events. The costume piece can be dismissed as offering a special kind of entertainment; dramatized history is often, not always, too eclectic, suffering from a structural split between the scene and the action, obscuring the poverty of the performance and the actors' inhumanity by its pretensions to historic truth. Historic personages, when they appear, appear not as men or women but in a quasi-mythical clothing. (pp. 567-68)

The legitimate illusion, on the other hand, once established, will always give the sense of contemporaneity, of happening before the...