This was a nice story with likable characters but for some reason it didn't really feel like the D.E. Stevenson I've come to know.
Gerald is coming home to England after having lost his job at a diamond mine in South Africa. Stolen diamonds were found in the inner lining of his jacket. He just barely escaped being thrown in prison. Obviously he was framed, but why? And by whom? He is completely depressed and uncertain of being able to get another job, since he has no references.
Eventually he decides to seek out his sister Elizabeth (Bess), who is a famous actress of the stage. They were extremely close siblings and she is relieved and delighted to see him after a long time of hearing nothing. He is invited to stay at her place while he looks for a job.
Meanwhile, Bess has her own troubles. She believes that she is suffering from an inherited mental disorder, melancholia. She has occasional bouts of utter despair. For this reason, she refuses the man who wants to marry her. She is terrified of bringing trouble to him later in life, or of passing on some sort of mental unbalance to her offspring.
How both siblings find their way out of their worries is the plot of the story.
Sir Walter McCallum, the would-be fiancé of Bess, is quite a good character, and Gerald and Bess are both nice. Not a bad book, but for some reason it didn't quite feel like D.E. Stevenson's métier. Maybe it was the fact that the so-called mystery of who took the diamonds wasn't really a mystery at all (anyone could identify the culprit almost from the beginning). Maybe it was also the loose ends regarding Gerald's uncle and the farm. Anyway, I'll give any sequels a chance, but probably won't revisit this one. ( )

Gerald and Elizabeth are half siblings. Elizabeth is a famous stage actress and Gerald is an electrical engineer who has been sacked from his job in a South African diamond mind after being accused of stealing diamonds. Elizabeth's mother suffered from melancholia, and her mother's sister is in a mental institution so Elizabeth has decided never to marry. Walter, the man Elizabeth is never going to marry, sorts out Gerald's problems and helps Gerald sort out Elizabeth's. Walter is such a paragon that when he and Elizabeth decide to marry she says that she would be proud to obey him. I was horrified. I was jolted by an episode of anti-semitism, a piece of contemptuous stereotyping. ( )

While it’s sufficiently readable to keep one’s interest gently engaged, and there are charming passages and likeable characters galore, "Gerald and Elizabeth" is something of a stretch in numerous ways, even allowing for the DES formula of everyone ending up romantically paired up with all “mysteries” neatly resolved.

*****

Dust jacket blurb:

Gerald Brown is young, good-looking, personable, but he holds himself aloof from the other passengers aboard the Ariadne, a small passenger ship returning to London from Cape Town, South Africa. In fact, his behavior is so extremely antisocial that he appears on deck only late at night, rarely venturing from his cabin during the day. Something is troubling him deeply, something that happened while he was working as an engineer in a Cape Town diamond mine that has left him spent and hopeless.

After the Ariadne docks in London, Gerald, desperately in need of a job, decides to contact his sister, the beautiful and famous actress, Elizabeth Burleigh, whose current play is the hit of the London theater season. As he reveals to her his haunting past in South Africa, he learns that she too is suffering, that behind her facade of gaiety and sophistication lurks a nagging suspicion about her mental health that is threatening to destroy her career and her love affair as well.

What are the forces that seem bent on these destroying these young people who have so much to live for? Can the mysteries surrounding their lives be solved – and in time to prevent irreversible consequences?

D.E. Stevenson reveals the answers to these questions in a way that will hold her thousands of fans breathless until the very end…

*****

A glaringly obvious diamond-theft frame-up has our hero fleeing the gossip and speculative glances of South Africa to end up under the protective wing of his older half-sister Elizabeth, star of a rather goofy-sounding London stage play – Elizabeth plays a princess from the planet Venus marooned on Earth, to the delight of the hypothetical crowds who pack each performance during the play’s astoundingly successful run.

But all is not well in Elizabeth’s world either. Though feted by the all and vigorously courted by a kind, handsome and wealthy Scottish shipyard owner, Elizabeth fears that she has inherited the “melancholia” which plagued her long-deceased mother. How can she marry with such a doom hanging over her head? – for naturally it will be passed along to her own children!

As Gerald seeks to make a new start he also strives to delve into the background of Elizabeth’s mother, hoping to make some sort of discovery which will ease his sister’s worries and smooth the rocky path of her romance.

A wartime bombing raid on the night Elizabeth was born and an enterprising maternity nurse hold the key to the actress’s future happiness, and the events surrounding her birth are as spectacularly far-fetched as D.E. Stevenson’s conception of mental illness. Shades of the bizarre insanity scenario of Rochester’s Wife, published thirty years earlier, made me cringe in readerly discomfort for the author’s lack of research and her apparent clinging to archaic superstitions.

The mysteries aren’t very mysterious, and the characters never truly come to life. The author could and did do much better in many of her other novels. In my eyes, this is a book to round out one’s DES collection, but otherwise I feel that it is without a lot of merit. Please don’t give it to a neophyte Dessie; it might endanger one’s contention that this is indeed an author to spend time and energy tracking down!

http://leavesandpages.com/2014/03/13/gerald-and-elizabeth-d-e-stevenson/ ( )