We love this cover for Anne Maybury’s 1968 novel The Minerva Stone. Maybury is also known as Edith Arundel (her birth name) and Katherine Troy, whereas the cover artist is also known as nobody, because this brilliant piece is unattributed. Sad. Moving on to the fiction, we’ve mentioned how vintage mysteries and sleaze novels can be romance-adjacent, but having never actually read an official romance, we were making an assumption. In the end our hypothesis about the similarity was confirmed. In both cases love and desire are handled explosively, if clumsily, with similar unbridled emotional progressions and interior musings that can make you cringe. The main difference is that vintage romances—this romance at least—don’t enter the bedroom, while male-oriented vintage fiction always gets through the door, and in many cases between the sheets.
The Minerva Stone is a gothic romance, a popular subset of the whole. On a mossy old castle estate called Guinever Court, in a village called Azurstone, fictively located in Dorset, England, a woman named Sarah Rhodes languishes in a loveless marriage with television star Niall Rhodes, but pines for her adventurous former lover Luke Ashton who’s just come back from the Far East. Shortly after she begins to think naughty thoughts about Luke, someone almost runs Sarah down with a car, then someone takes a potshot at her hubby. Niall thinks someone wants to ruin his show business career with bad publicity, but Sarah suspects there’s a deeper secret. She’s right, of course. And it may all have to do with her husband’s past, of which she knows little to nothing.
Sounds fun, right? But the book left us a bit cold. Sarah’s marriage to the distant and career-minded Niall never made sense, nor did her gravitation toward her former lover Luke. He’s alright, but he ain’t all that. In observing Maybury try to sort out this dilemma, we saw a little more clearly why hard-boiled fiction usually ditches deep emotion and relies upon women whose sexual availability is a given. Writing insightfully about love in non-eyerolling ways isn’t easy for most authors. So who can fault those who keep it simple? The women always want the hero, and he’s always drawn by beauty. Easy as can be. We’re glad we read The Minerva Stone, though it’ll probably be our last official romance. It may not have been great, but it was atmospheric—plus, just take another look at that cover.
Update: the cover is by Harry Barton.
