Delicious reading on a snowy day. Finished it in about a day.
One of D.E. Stevenson's best.
Julia is sitting on a park bench waiting for her fiancé (a prim, selfish dictator of a man), when along comes Stephen and sits next to her. Stephen is recently returned from diamond mines in South Africa and knows no one in London, but when he sees the beautiful Julia sitting forlorn and nervously trying to avoid the impertinence of passersby, he seizes the opportunity to make friends. He is one of D.E. Stevenson's "Nice Young Men Who Understand."
And that is just the beginning of Julia's new friendships. There's her new landlady, her new employer, and her until-now unknown uncle in Scotland. Also Stephen's mother, who is a dear. All of these new people help to change her life subtly, and the process is delightful.
Highly HIGHLY recommend. ( )

D.E. Stevenson's The Blue Sapphire is an easy and enjoyable read, albeit a bit predictable. Julie Harburn, an only child, wants to strike out on her own now that her father has remarried. Julia is engaged to her childhood friend and only Morland's lack of a partnership in his father's firm has prevented them from setting a date. All of this changes when she meets Stephen Brett, a young mining engineer recently back from Africa who possesses a gorgeous blue sapphire from an abandoned mine.

Everything is made easy for our heroine, who finds a nice boarding-house with a friendly landlady, gets a good job due to the offices of said friendly landlady, and then moves in with an elderly, heretofore unknown uncle who is kindness itself. The worst Julia faces is the jealousy of the girls she works with, the unpleasantness of an alienating disagreement with her always-distant father, and the illness of her uncle. We are never really in doubt as to which suitor she will choose, and it's all nice and tidy. I enjoyed this while I was reading it (Stevenson just carries you along with her effortless prose) but I don't think this one will wear particularly well. ( )

Dust jacket blurb:

The blue sapphire is a gem which the Ancients called the hyacinthus and which Solinus described as ‘a gem which feels the influence of the air and sympathises with the heavens and does not shine equally if the sky is cloudy or bright’.

On a beautiful spring day, Julia Harburn sat on a seat in Kensington Gardens enjoying the sunshine. She was wearing a white frock and a large straw hat with a sapphire-blue ribbon which exactly matched her eyes – a strange coincidence, as it turned out, for the blue sapphire was to have a far-reaching influence upon her life. So far, her life had been somewhat dull and circumscribed; but quite suddenly her horizons were enlarged. She began to make new friends – and enemies – and she began to discover new strength and purpose in her own nature. This development of her character led her into strange adventures, some amusing, others full of sorrow and distress. The story is itself a blue sapphire story, of clouds and sunshine.

*****

As pretty Julia sits on her park bench waiting for her tardy fiancé Morland to appear for their teatime rendezvous, she is increasingly worried that she will be “annoyed” by the numerous questionable masculine types who have started closing in on her, like hopeful jackals surrounding a tender little gazelle. Luckily a rescuer appears in the person of tall, handsome and very forthcoming Stephen Brett, newly arrived in London after some years away in South Africa overseeing a gemstone mining operation. At first Julia snubs the friendly Stephen, but she soon warms to his innocent cheerfulness, and the two part on mutually appreciative terms just as Morland grumpily hoves into view.

Julia is waiting to break some rather big news to Morland. She has decided to move out of her father’s house and find a job and take a room in a boarding house. Some years ago Julia’s mother had died, and her new stepmother, while not at all cruel, is making it increasingly obvious that she would be happier if she were the only woman in the household.

Morland loftily dismisses Julia’s intentions of independence, but she holds firm, eventually ending up in an attic room in the fabulously Victorian-styled boarding house of the inestimable Miss Martineau, ex-actress and current patroness to “resting” theatrical folk. Miss Martineau takes a shine to Julia, and sets her up in a job at a posh hat shop, where Julia proceeds to thrive, becoming a very special chum to her new boss, the ex-Parisian Madame Claire, to the deep resentment of Julia’s several jealous co-workers.

Meanwhile Stephen Brett pops in and out of Julia’s life, adding some much-needed good humour and friendliness as Julia finds her way as a working girl and tries to cope with Morland’s moodiness and reluctance to set a date for their marriage. Stephen is embroiled in a complicated situation involving a potential sapphire mine back in South Africa; he finds relief from his worries in his growing friendship with Julia.

A turning point in the plot occurs as Julia receives a letter from her father’s estranged uncle in Scotland, begging Julia to come and see him before he dies. Off she goes, against Morland’s advice, to find in her Uncle Randal the loving relationship she has never been able to attain with her own father. But Uncle Randal is declining rapidly, and it seems as though Julia will tragically lose him just when she has found him…

Stopping right here, because this is a sweet story which you will want to finish up for yourself. D.E. Stevenson is in her usual form, mixing unlikely scenarios with sunny-natured heroines, grumpy-but-ultimately-innocuous villains, salt-of-the-earth old family retainers, and a knight-in-shining-armour (or two) who appear(s) at just the right time.

The mixture-as-usual, but just what is needed in a book of this gentle genre.

http://leavesandpages.com/2014/03/14/this-is-more-like-it-a-proper-little-gem-th... ( )

While sitting on a park bench, waiting for her fiancé, Julia meets a friendly young man. Stephen has just returned to London from Africa, and is feeling lonely, so Julia chats with him until her fiancé arrives. The Blue Sapphire is divided into two distinct sections. In Part One Julia develops her independence in London, then in Part Two she travels to Scotland to establish a relationship with some new-found family. The romance plays a secondary role in this book, which focuses more on Julia's development. In fact, the young men in her life basically disappear for about half of the book—and that is the best part.

I had some pretty strong reservations while reading the first part of the book. Usually when I read older books (and I read a lot of them), I accept that they were written in times that may have had different conventions and values, and don't pay any attention to some things which might be considered a little off today. This time, however, I was bothered by the fact that an intelligent, independent woman would invest her savings in a stock tip from from a man she met on a park bench. That incident, along with the fact that I didn't really like the way the romance was developing, almost ruined the book for me, but I kept going because I wanted to find out what would happen to Julia.

Fortunately, Part Two made up for the shortcomings of Part One. The story flowed nicely, and the characters were likeable. I would have been quite happy if the entire book had consisted of most of Part Two, with four or five chapters of Part One to fill in Julia's background information. Much as I love having romance in the books I read, this is one book that would have been better without it. While this isn't one of my favourite D. E. Stevenson books, it also isn't one of the worst. I'll probably read it again, but there are parts that I'll skip. ( )