Publisher's Synopsis
"Azarian" is the story of a brilliant, facile, and heartless young man, who has inspired a profound affection in a girl, and keeps her, with a little pitiful love and a great deal of pride, dangling after him, till she learns, by accident, that he has no real need of her. She escapes from the thraldom, is befriended by a magnanimous actress whom she had cast off to please his caprice, goes to Europe, returns, and is seen by him through a window, when her tranquil countenance punishes his pride.
-The Christian Examiner, Volume 77 [1864]
..".The same poetic glamour she threw over all the work that now poured in swift profusion from her pen: Sir Rohan's Ghost, Azarian, and a score of short stories in the Atlantic and Harper's and other periodicals. It had been felt that the faults so manifest in "In a Cellar" and "The Amber Gods" would disappear as the young author gained in maturity and knowledge of her art, but they not only persisted, they increased. Like Charlotte Bronte, whom in so many ways she resembled, she knew life only as she dreamed of it in her country seclusion or read of it in romance. At length toleration ceased. In 1865 The North American Review condemned Azarian as ''devoid of human nature and false to actual society," and then added the significant words: "We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be real, to be true to something." It marks not alone the end of the first period in Miss Prescott's career; it marks the closing of an era in American fiction."
-A History of American Literature [1915]
