Whispering Dust (Heathen Edition)
Dora Eldrid Reynolds (1889-1958) - the daughter of artist, poet, and author Amy Dora Reynolds, who wrote using the nom de plume Mrs. Fred Reynolds - was an artist and author in her own right, albeit one with a very brief career. In 1913, she published her second and final novel Whispering Dust, in which 33-year-old Naomi, "a curate's orphan and a curate's niece," who, after 30 years of living amongst grime and turnip fields and having "done nothing," journeys to Egypt to wander its streets, tombs, and desert in search of more, of something intangible yet somehow just within reach, of what she can only inadequately express as Space (with a capital S) - all while narrating the story to You, a man whom she is quite certain she has invented and who does not exist . . . or does he? Rendered with vivid, poetic prose and colorful descriptions that bring Egypt alive on the page, Whispering Dust is an overlooked and forgotten gem of early modernist literature.
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Become an affiliate"Whispering Dust by Eldrid Reynolds is a book of indescribable charm, which is all the more enjoyable because of its elusiveness." -The Boston Globe
"A clever book, pulsing with life and emotion . . . laid amid the color, mystery and terror of Egypt." -The Observer
"A distinctly out-of-the-way novel." -The Publishers' Weekly
"The charm is not felt at first - but grows steadily as one progresses with this tale of the young woman who goes to Egypt - to the desert - to seek space and to find herself . . . The book speaks to all lonely women - to all who long to give and know not to whom to give - who long to seek - and know not how to seek . . . this book is of such compelling power that one will long for Egypt - to go there, to live there, to experience that call of the desert that this woman felt." -Mabel Margaret Hoopes, The Book News Monthly
"There can be no half measures in any reader's attitude toward this book: it will either leave you cold, speaking to you in an unknown tongue, or else you will hail it with delight, as one of those rare and delicious discoveries, to be lingered over and reverted to, again and again, with ever new and infinite appreciation." -Frederic Taber Cooper (from his Introduction)
"Whispering Dust is a novel which has caused somewhat of a controversy among the reviewers." -The Birmingham Age-Herald
"Miss Eldrid Reynolds has the true art of the novelist . . . In the present story she has chosen to interpret a very difficult phase of emotion, and one that will not be immediately appreciated by every class of reader . . . Yet, in spite of a certain vagueness of touch, she succeeds to a remarkable degree in interpreting the undefined yearnings of a woman's heart . . . This is a very clever, rather subtle, and highly imaginative story. Women with a temperament will adore it; while those men, who profess themselves unable to understand women, will perhaps learn something more from its pages of the inscrutable enigma of femininity." -The Daily Telegraph