"_The Green Mirror_ has not one touch of aniline in all its warm colors, rich presences and faithful portraiture. It is a fine novel, grappling bravely with the great ironies of mother-love."--_New Republic_.
"In the development and disclosure of the essential and incidental scenes of the domestic embroilment following upon disclosure of the central situation Walpole vindicates his title to the primacy in the ranks of British fictionists who have undertaken to represent imaginatively the source, spirit and outcome of insularity translated in terms of selfishness and family pride. It is life transcribed as inexorable and fatalistic as _Fortitude_ and _Duchess of Wrexe_."--_Philadelphia North American_.
The novel which first introduced Walpole to America was _Fortitude_, that most beautiful, most strong story of a man’s fight against heredity and circumstance for mastery over himself. The theme of the book lies in a saying of the Cornish fisherman, old Frosted Moses: "’Tisn’t life that matters, but the courage you bring to it."
Peter Westcott, son of the black and sullen generations of Scaw House, heard Frosted Moses say that, as he, a tiny little boy, crouched in a chimney corner at the old inn and heard the sages talk of ancient Cornish legends, and of the glory of the great world without. So did he imbibe a spirit of adventure which he never lost.
He left Scaw House and his gloomy father, fought his way through school, through the welter of a London boarding-house, through poverty and failure to success as a novelist. But his struggle and his success were not the poor desire for petty fame which many conventional heroes of fiction regard as struggle. What he desired in life was fortitude, not headlines; the power to face failure as well as the ability to become known. The spirit of adventure, humanity, these ever stirred him, and he lost neither in becoming a victor.
Of the woman who loved Peter and the woman whom Peter loved, Walpole makes a magnificent love story. There were many hours of dramatic misunderstanding in the passion that sprang up between the solid, broad-shouldered Peter, with his quiet desire to write and be friendly toward all sorts of people, and Clare, the slender, nervous, gay, red-haired girl who had always been protected. But there was a great and beautiful wonder of passion as well; and the happiness of the little London house to which they returned from the honeymoon is not to be forgotten.