IRISH BIOGRAPHIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 70, 23 March 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

IRISH BIOGRAPHIES.

SUSAN ERTZ'S NOVEL A MYSTIC'S EXPERIENCES. Pickwick . . . represents, the average Englishman infinitely better than Hamlet.—M; Andre Maurois. It is not the Divine purpose that we should be encyclopaedias. —Lord Hugh Cecil. According to John Collier, the novelist, it is a common weakness of writers to describe the world as they saw it when they were young and impressionable. When they get over that weakness they give us their real work.

A Leeds bookseller was recently asked by a very serious lady for a copy of "Tess of the Dardanelles," and she explained that she wanted it as. a gift for her nephew, who was very fond of war books.

An all-nations prize novel competition is being- organised. It will open at the end of April, and will close t;t the end of April, 1936. The total amount of the prize will be some thousands of pounds. The conditions include a guarantee that the winning novel will be published simultaneously in every competing country. Messrs. Ivor Nicholson and Watson will have the English rights. Mr. Hugh Walpole is chairman of the judging committee.

L. M. Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" is a book that, like "Alice in Wonderland," will live, and it is a happy coincidence that Angus and Robertson have published a cheap reprint of this first of Miss Montgomery's series of stories about Anne at a time when it is being filmed in Auckland. The book is not only a reprint, it is the authorised film edition of "Anne of Green Gables." No more delightful story of the kind has been written in recent years than that of the quaint, imaginative, and precocious little orphan who so brightened the home of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, and, in spite of her strange ways and numerous scrapes, charmed and won the admiration of all who came to know her as she grew and budded into young womanhood. This is an edition, with its almost score of illustrations, that will be welcomed even by those who are already familiar with Miss Montgomery's wonderfully accurate eh.Vracterisation.