"WOMEN MUST WORK."

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 285, 1 December 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

"WOMEN MUST WORK."

WHY BE FOOLS ? Etta Morison, the leading character in Richard Aldington's latest book, "Women Must Work" (Chatto and Windus), is an English approximation to Ann Vickers, but without her crusading, reforming spirit. She is daughter to a respectable tradesman in a thoroughly ugly English provincial town. In despair at the thought of living as a parasite upon her father until some eligible husband comes along, she proposes leaving home to earn her living, but is met with a storm of reproach—the kind of diatribe which Mr. Aldington says "must already have been a set piece in the early Minoan period.' After preparing herself to be a typiste she runs away to London, where she goes through what is to many women the grimmest part of their lives —a part which they laugh off as their "early struggles," but which is really a period of semi-starvation and heartbreaking loneliness. Always ellicient and succesaful in her work, she is less happy in her personal contacts. The reader is mors irritated than sympathetic when her lack of sophistication lands her in an awkward position with her lustful fir3t employer; and again when she refuses the man she loves because, at the moment of liis return from the front to be her lover, shi hears that her brother is wounded and missing. But that is not enough: she proceeds from blunder to blunder. In her maturity and, presumably, discretion, she takes as Jier lover a married man. Instead of keeping the affair on an experimental or intellectual basis, she must grow sentimental over him and bear an illegitimate child. Ultimately she marries and achieves all the material success she could wish; but so bitter has the struggle been that we find she has run full circle and is inflicting upon her daughter all the subtle cruelties from which she revolted in her own home.

On© must feci strongly about this book. It is admirably written with the trenchant wit that characterises its author: th© style whets one's appetite even when th© characters fail miserably. Why lias Mr. Aldington made Ms heroine such an egregious fool? Typical she obviously is not, and if not, why make a heroin© so selfish, so incapable of deep affection, and ultimately if not at first, so nearly devoid of finer feelings? The book must interest not only all women who, like Etta, have worked to uphold their own self-respect, but those thousands of others who have worked to snatch a living out of "the human dogfight of existence."