TWO WOMEN

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22419, 4 June 1938, Page 18

TWO WOMEN

Pre-War and Post-War World My Part in a Changing World. By Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Victor Gollancz. 15/- net.) Further. By Amelie Posse-Brazdova. Routledge. (15/- net.) Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.

Mrs Pethick-Lawrence is an outstanding personality among those politically bent intellectuals of the pre-war era who fought so tirelessly to make social changes about them for the better. Slum children, working girls, oppressed Irish, victimised Boers, blockaded Germans, all enlisted the aid of her indignant sympathy and her energy. The greatest part of her book about herself and her times is devoted to the story of the fight for women’s franchise in England from 1906 onward and gives an exciting account of the brawls, riots, imprisonments, and humiliations produced by the irrational refusal of the Home Office to allow the women to put forward their case. There is a certain frank sentimentalism about Mrs PethickLawrence’s attitude which does not belong to our present jaded period, and it serves to point the fact that those who fight tne good fight, for unprofitable causes are those who have the courage of their emotions as well as their convictions. The book is refreshingly permeated by the old belief in the combination of Christian tolerance and a scientific outlook for the cure of human ills and wrongs. It may seem to us that the world has changed too rapidly for the part of Mrs PethickLawrence and the liberal socialists of her day to haVe been effective in it; and she herself inquires: “Is world war to bring opr era to an end and thrust back the human race to its starting point?” Typically and reasonably, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence

Icoks to the re-education of the mass of the people to save it. In “Further,” Amelie Posse-Braz-dova, author of “Sardinian Sideshow,” writes brilliantly of artists and politicians in the capitals of Europe after the war. It is boring to hear one’s acquaintances praising friends whom one has never met, and Amelie Posse-Brazdova sometimes tries our patience in this way. But her pen portraits of Italian servants, Russian refugees, “mad” musicians, etc., are more objective and therefore more amusing. So is her account of Mussolini at a reception and as critic at an art exhibition; and her many comments on the social havoc produced in Europe by the war are pertinent and interesting. Her account of 14 contented years of life in Rome ends at the point when she migrated with her Czechoslovakian husband to the neighbourhood of Prague, to restore an ancient castle by invitation of the Government. She appears to have found the job and the climate a little daunting; and this lighthearted book, more superficial in many ways than Mrs Pethick-Lawrence’s, ends on a glimmer note: One of the few things about which all seem to be agreed is that this country (Czechoslovakia) and, above all, its north-western corner, where our property is situated, is the most exposed point in the whole continent. If “they” one day come sweeping over this fertile land we know in any case what to expect. Then in deadly earnest there will be “nothing more,” either of our home or of - hundreds and thousands of others put there. Then much more will be at stake, the future of Europe, the whole of our civilisation.