The Island of Enchantment

Justus Miles Forman's The Island of Enchantment is an elegant Edwardian romance of atmosphere, intrigue, and emotional discovery, set in a vividly imagined island world where landscape and feeling continually mirror one another. The book combines the pleasures of adventure fiction-mystery, disguise, danger, and social complication-with a more refined interest in manners, sentiment, and moral choice. Its prose is polished and pictorial, shaped by the late-Victorian taste for exotic locales and by the Ruritanian tradition of courtly romance, yet it remains intimate in its attention to character. Forman, an American novelist and dramatist of the early twentieth century, was known for urbane popular fiction that often looked beyond the United States to European settings, cosmopolitan society, and theatrical plots of mistaken identity and romantic testing. Educated, widely read, and attuned to the stage as well as the magazine market, he brought to his fiction a dramatist's sense of scene and a traveler's appetite for glamour, distance, and cultural contrast. Readers who enjoy graceful romantic adventure, old-world atmosphere, and fiction poised between sentiment and suspense will find this novel especially rewarding.