The Passionate Year — James Hilton

The Passionate Year. By James HILTON.Mr. Hilton's well-written book, with its public-school background, will be of interest to many schoolmasters, who will follow the career of its hero with sympathetic pity. Kenneth Speed comes to Millstead, full of youthful enthusiasm and ideals; and gains, with somewhat startling rapidity, popularity and promotion. With his marriage to his headmaster's daughter, a highly-strung girl most unsuitable to Speed's neurotic temperament, his career takes a downward course, and he fails pitifully, both as a husband and as a schoolmaster. Clare Harrington, his wife's friend, provides the usual three-cornered problem, but the situation is handled with refreshing originality and cleanness. The work of education demands unwavering service, and Speed's loss of power over the boys, his alienation from his colleagues, and the gradual withering of his enthusiasm, will be recognized, by those who know, as the inevitable result of his disturbed domestic life. The various characters are well sketched, and the atmosphere cleverly indicated. Mr. Hilton is to be congratulated on adding this book to the limited number of novels in which a schoolmaster plays the leading part.--The Journal of Education - Volume 56 - Page 169, 1924