GIRLHOOD

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22389, 30 April 1938, Page 18

GIRLHOOD

A Childhood. By Franceses AlUnaon. The Hogarth Press. 187 pp. (7/0 net.)

Francesca Allinson has written most intensively seven minute studies of the life of a young girl. All are highly subjective, but the best is the most subjective, the account of an illness during which the child was hypersensitive to her surroundings and living in an unpleasantly acute state of conscious-, ness. The book should be of interest to psychologists and to those who, musing, try to apprehend the sights and tastes and smells of long forgotten childish realities. The book is a triumph of memory, or so it seems, for the writer is apparently recalling her own experiences.' It may be that the sketches—they .are no more—are a work of imagination; if so, they are even more remarkable. The whole book is so intense that it is disquieting, for there is a strange suggestion of an adult child feeling and noticing qualities and relations that children are not commonly supposed to perceive. Not that there is sense of precocity or unnatural inquisitiveness; on the contrary, the child arid her associates are quite normal, and most of her ways are pleasant. The strain comes merely from the heightened apprehension. One example may make the comment clear. The child had just recovered from her illness, and the nurse had decided that it was time for indulgence to end: My mother's continuous giving war to .my wishes and will had become irksome: the softness relaxed me,.the willing became burdensome. Frilly's authority had taken that burden away, and by substituting her will for mine, she set me at greater rest I was glad of the astringent.

Miss Allinson writes with unvary-, ing clarity and point. Enid Marx has made several wood engravings, some merely pictorial,' others suggesting the strange intellectual remoteness of childhood that is often suggested by the text.