FICTION : A PROPER WOMAN by Lillian Beckwith (St. Martin’s: $13.95; 192 pp.).

Can Anna Matheson ever find love in the heather of the Hebrides between world wars?

She has a withered arm, you know. She put aside her own desires to become a schoolteacher so that she could tend the family and the farm. Then she let her callow brother and her cruel sister-in-law shove her out of her own home.

What unfelicitous fates she endured, including a loveless marriage to Fergus McFee, a drunken dissolute who didn’t bathe, didn’t talk to neighbors, didn’t help around the house. What he did do, with frequency, was beat poor Anna when the spite or spirits moved him. Worse, in Anna’s eyes, he beat the only loving creature in her life, Solas, the horse.

What odd writing this is, where metaphor may meet pun, intentionally or not: “The resulting coolness on her scalp was almost heady in its effect.”

What an old-fashioned, stilted, predictable novel of villainy and chastity. Of course Anna falls in love because she deserves love and life is always fair in romantic fiction. Readers of romances will also fall in love--and have all expectations fulfilled--by the pastoral innocence of these pages.