UNIVERSITY GIRLS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

UNIVERSITY GIRLS.

Mary Sturt has followed up her "Swallows in Springtime" with a novel of which the scene is laid for the most part in Oxford—"Be Gentle to the Young" (Hodder and Stoughton). Among the fifteen hundred young men and women who became "freshers" at Oxford one year were three girls—Peggy Miller, Alice Temple and Christobel Favre. It is these three girls and their undergraduate and family life that Miss Sturt sketches for us. Peggy and Alice had been friends since they were a year old, for they both had their home in Oxford, Peggy's father being a successful coach, and the father of Alice a professor. Christobel was brought up in a humbler and less academic atmosphere. Her father—Sam Favre—was an engine driver, and her home was in a little town of grimy red bricks. The throe become fast friends, but Christobel. who is distinctly clever and more astute than the other two, secures more of the company of Alice than Peggy, and how she does it and how it ends gives Miss Sturt her opportunity to sketch for us three types of student girls, and she does it to the life. There is no plot, and we are not particularly sensible of the academic atmosphere of Oxford. But there is a good deal of feminine talk and banter, passing glimpses of young men, and members of tlie Oxford Movement, and a little of the love element. There is a great deal about the relatives of the girls—Peggy's chiefly—and of their family troubles, and then a little of what happens to the girls when the college days are over. Miss Sturt knows and understands the people she describes, their background and their problems, and she sketches them with fidelity and lightness of touch.