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The Red Raven: An Autobiographical Novel by Lilli Palmer PDFLILLI PALMER established her: self as an independent sort early in her career. “Miss Palmer, extremely pleasing to look at, does not rely upon her looks,” one columnist wrote in 1938, three years after her film debut. She sang, she painted and she wrote, and she has now followed her well‐received first literary effort, a .1975 autobiography called “Change Lobsters- and Dance,” with a novel, “The Red Raven.” It Is not likely to diminish her reputation as an entertaining new writer.

Said also to be based on actual incidents and relationships in Miss Palmer's life, “The Red Raven” touches all bases. There's a bittersweet heterosexual triangle, a lesbian in a closet of the past and an actress recalling the first, struggling years of an international career. But at true center, there is little calculated about this novel. It is an often fresh and very vivid account of the loss of innocence, that bereavement from which first novels tend to spring.

We are plunged into the past from the book's first page, when the narrator, an actress rather coyly called “L,” catches a glimpse of a bronze head in studio where she is sitting for her portrait.. It is a sculpture of the beautiful and tortured Anabel, once her best friend and mother confessor, and “L” learns that Anabel and the painter, woman, had once. had an affair. Spurred on by that revelation, “L” begins to read the diary and a letter left for her by Mabel before her death some years before.
 
Through the diary and. “L's” own musings during the portrait sittings, which take on the color of psychoanalytic sessions, the story unfolds of her early love affair with a cynical, unruly young artist named Jerome and of the simultaneous affair, carried on in secret, between Jerome .and Anabel. In their shared relationship, the three have all the poignancy of Elizabeth Bowen's adolescents manques.

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