FEMININE CHAT

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28128, 17 November 1956, Page 3

FEMININE CHAT

This Feminine World. By Mrs Robert Henrey. Dent. 217 pp. Mrs Robert Henrey has written some excellent books, in particular “The Little Madeleine,” the autobiography of her childhood in Montmartre, and its successor “An Exile in Soho.” But the fluency, not to say volubility, of her style as a writer has been her undoing: and popular success has no doubt contributed to the decline in the quality, though not the quantity, □f her output. Her latest work fls a series of chatty journalistic articles such as are more usually found between the glossy covers of fashionable women's magazines than in book form. j>he meets and has her portrait painted by a well-known Portuguese portrait painter; and tells us all about him and his lively w-ife. (The portrait of Mrs Henrey, with one bare and one gloved hand—“as in the famous Titian at the Louvre”—graces the frontispiece and of her book.) She interviews the “fabulous” Madame Suzy Volterra, who won the 1955 Derby with her horse, Phil Drake, thus fulfilling a long-cherished ambition of her late husband, an equally “fabulous” personality. She chats about her elegant friend the Begum Aga Khan; and Visits an aristocrat among Parisian antique dealers, Madame Sonia Cahen d Anvers, a Rothschild by birth. She drops in on Anny Blatt, “the Queen Knitting.” and Hubert de Givenchy, the most youthful of the great Paris dressmakers And venturing further in the world of “haute couture,” she includes an interlude with the young widow of the celebrated Jacques Fath and another at the Salon of Christian "ior, where she encountered the Duchess of Windsor. Her book concludes with her return to London, an experience in broadcasting, and a o*ief spell in the Westminster Hospital. where with her usual easy skill and quick sympathies, she finds another ideal field for the exploitation of her journalistic talents. Alternating between “glamour” and sentimentality, her chat, in spite of (or because of) its superficiality, will no doubt find many delighted readers aniong the feminine world for whom it was designed.