"The author's knowledge of this matter has been painfully personal.
Her husband, a Polish political refugee, at the age of twenty-two,
was arrested and thrown into a vile Russian prison without trial,
and spent five years of his life thereafter in Siberian exile,
escaping in 1890 and fleeing to England. Throughout 'Olive Latham'
you get the impression that it is a veritable record of what one
woman went through for love.... This painful, poignant,
powerfully-written story permits one full insight into the cruel
workings of Russian justice and its effects upon the nature of a
well-poised Englishwoman. Olive comes out of the Russian hell
alive, and lives to know what happiness is again, but the horror of
those days in St. Petersburg, the remembrance of the inhumanity
which killed her lover never leaves her.... It rings true. It is a
grewsome study of Russian treatment of political offenders. Its
theme is not objectionable--a criticism which has been brought
against other books of Mrs. Voynich's."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
"So vividly are the coming events made to cast their shadows
before, that long before the half-way point is reached the reader
knows that Volodya's doom is near at hand, and that the chief
interest of the story lies not with him, but with the girl, and
more specifically with the curious mental disorders which her long
ordeal brings upon her. It is seldom that an author has succeeded
in depicting with such grim horror the sufferings of a mind that
feels itself slipping over the brink of sanity, and clutches
desperately at shadows in the effort to drag itself back."--_New
York Globe._