WOMEN THE WORLD OVER

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20956, 9 September 1933, Page 2

WOMEN THE WORLD OVER

(SPBUAT.LT WtriTEK Tlit jl.!y " ATALANTA."] More than once I have dwelt on the peculiarly dissective taste both of the reading "and th£ theatre-going public in England to-day. One might almost say that the nineteenth century was a period of great creations in fiction, and the twentieth, so far. a period given to the dismembering of the immortal recent dead. This ghoulishness was foreshadowed as early as in Tennvson's disenchanted sequel to "Locksley Hall," where it figures as the "Curse of the Prophet." To-day it has just battened on the fresh memory of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his ill-starred young wife, and is still worrying the corpse of that unj toward martinet, Edward Barrett.

"The Private Life of Mrs Siddons," a biography by Naomi Royde-Smith, certainly interposes the decent veil of a longer term of years between the life of a woman whose majestic genius and personality England delighted to honour and the vampirish modern reader. Judging by an inspired review in a soundly critical London magazine, the author has left this unforgottcn idol of the public more wing feathers than certain modern gossips who found her "humourless, self-conscious, angular, and stupid." But she elaborates an imagined heart-tragedy in the life of one who was tragedy's queen in her own day, depicting her as the unwilling and suffering rival of the two beautiful daughters that died for love of the fair and futile Sir Thomas Lawrence, who philandered with both. How much Miss Royde-Smith can show for her theory of a hidden passion, veiled on the one side as maternal affection and on the other as an adoring filial regard, is not easy for New Zealand readers to deteunine; but the whole effect is not far from that lurid afterglow of the literal lantern guiding the old-time bodysnatcher which so pervades the bookish horizon of the moment. The Fated Brontes.

"The Curse of the Prophet" has hovered more or less vainly over that trio of suffering geniuses who hid themselves under the elusive pennames of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Of Charlotte's heart-wound carried from a Belgian girls' college to that grim Yorkshire parsonage which saw her birth and her death no more and no less can be made than her first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, left to the curiosity of an earlier generation. Unwillingly she loved the irascible little bookman, M. Heger, who filled her starved soul with the knowledge her straitened environment denied then to girls, but the ghouls have dug up no more against her, and a love blessed with bell and book cured the grief of her pale, prim years of hidden storm. On Branwell, the weak, gifted ne'er-do-well brother of these spotless girls, scandal poured all the vials possible in life, and death brought no rehabilitation. Strange, volcanic, headstrong Emily flung out that lava-flood of a novel, "Wuthering Heights," and died first of the three. Gentle Anne, the youngest, achieved some verse and a quiet novel or two before she, too, went down in a decline. Charlotte, whose genius found fullest expression and achieved widest fame, wore the crown of happy marriage for eight brief months, and passed "to where beyond these voices there is peace" ere she reached 39. The fierce, eccentric father of the Brontes survived for many years his brilliant, fated children.

A Celtic Complex. Many theories have been propounded regarding the thwarted lives of these shadowed children of the North Country. Two dramas about them were running simultaneously in London last June. That seasoned play-taster, Desmond MacCarthy, pronounced the first, called simply "The Brontes," to be "improbable, cheap, and vulgar,' casting a groundless imputation on Emily, and making poor fun of Charlotte's lover and husband, Arthur Nichols. On the contrary, he found Clemence Dane's "Wild Decembers," a characteristically fine and trenchant study of life and character. I do not know whether either of these playwrights touched at all on one theory which seems to me a possible solution of at least part of the family tragedy. It will be remembered that the classic name of Bronte was coined out of the far from poetic name of Prunty. Patrick Prunty was a red-headed, quick-witted, mischievous Irish gossoon, who contrived to become the show pupil of a church school and subsequently a university student. Two possible careers opened before him; first, his ambition pointed him to preferment as a minister of the Irish Presbyterian Church. Talent, address, quickness of speech were all in his favour, but vocation was wanting. He was quietly advised to transfer his gifts to a quarter less exacting. In due time the Reverend Patrick Bronte, so styled on his crossing the Irish Channel to take up duty in the Church of England, became the rector of Haworth and the husband of a sweet, well-reared Cornish girl, Maria Branwell. She bore six delicate, precocious children, two of whom died early. The little girls grew up in straitest, most parochial bonds. A pall of oblivion stretched between the English parsonage and the ancestral, cabin of the Pruntys. Now, is it not possible that these lonely girls, pent in this dour, drilled corner of old Northumbria, suffered all their lives, inter alia, from a repressed Celtic complex? Had Patrick Prunty felt a vocation and lived for it in Ireland, they would have enjoyed no more material comfort than at Haworth, probably less, but there would have been light, colour, and social freedom of a sort in their lives. They would have grown up amid a world of banshees, fairies, and merrows of the sea; they would have vibrated to the immortal appeal of the "Londonderry Air"; they would have dreamed of the fairy earl of Desmond riding a horse with silver shoes until the Judgment Day. and perhaps would have rescued the legend of Oism and "pearl-pale Niam" in their ocean bower long before W. B. Yeats gave it anew to a delighted public. Perhaps this hidden, unrealised Celtic complex was indeed the foundation of the Bronte tragedy. Belle Sherwin to the Fore.

The latest issue of the "International Women's News" gives prominent place to the official part of American women in the working of the much discussed National Industrial Recovery Act. "The purpose of the act," we learn, "itself the key-piece of the new adminstration's programme of recovery is putting men back to work through shortening hours and regulating wages." Miss Belle Sherwin, president of the Women Voters' League, numbering some ten million members, has been called to the Consumers' Advisory Committee, one of the several committees set up to initiate the new act. This committee consists of five persons, three women, including Miss Sherwin, and two men, and acts in the consumers' interest in dealing with the hundreds of codes of fair competition submitted by various industries. At last child labour is to be dealt with on a large scale. Late cables say it has indeed been dealt with. The League of Women Voters, we also learn, has moved its office to Lafayette Square, which fronts Wnite House. Undoubtedly the feminine eye will be turned full upon the President.

SURPRISE PARTY A surprise party visited the home of Mrs E. R. R. Jackman (St. Albans) to honour Miss E. Jackman on the occasion of her birthday anniversary. With games and competitions, the time passed pleasantly. Among those present were Mr and Mrs Rundle, Mr and Mrs Fife, Mr and Mrs Hight, Mr and Mrs R. W. Coburn, Mesdames Bateman, Wilson, Poole, Doyle, Oborn, Misses Fife, Cookson, Poole, Bateman, E. Jackman, N. Jackman, Messrs Ramsey, E. Jackman, Fife, and B. Browne.