The Willow Maiden

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Someone who was richly qualified to judge of the matter once observed that bad poets borrow, whereas great poets steal. Perhaps the main problem with The Willow Maiden is that Meghan Collins is not audacious enough to be a good thief. Her story concerns Denis, a mortal boy who falls in love with a dryad, the willow maiden of the title. They marry, on the understanding that Denis will allow his bride to return to the forest every spring. Jealousy of course supervenes and, in a frenzy of possessiveness, Denis almost chops down the tree to which his wife will return; he then realizes that he must honour his word, and he accepts that his wife’s needs are as important as his own.

From the point of view of ideology, The Willow Maiden is impeccable and stylish. From most other points of view, it is sadly deficient. Diction and sentence structure are woefully simple — inappropriate to an audience presumably ready for a story dealing with the moral complexities of The Willow Maiden. Treatment is also banal; this novel need not be as good as Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” or Arnold’s “Forsaken Merman” — but it should find a treatment subtle enough to do justice to its subject and its audience. Unfortunately, The Willow Maiden remains wooden throughout, and its lavish format, and the generous, wonderful colour illustrations by the award-winning Laszlo Gal, are not enough to save a story undermined from beginning to end by the author’s unfortunate lack of audacity.