Emotional Life

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29952, 13 October 1962, Page 3

Emotional Life

Fool in Love. By Katharine Trevelyan. GoUancs. 245 pp.

This autobiography will please some, but by no means all readers. Katharine Trevelyan (niece of the historian and of Gertrude Bell also) has bad an unusually sad and difficult emotional life, and she has always lived on a level of far greater Spiritual intensity than the general run of mankind. She thus feels that she has much to say, especially of her efforts to learn "why we are bom, where we are going, who God is and why.”

In spite of her brilliant pen, her sincerity and complete honesty, the author's preoccupation with all her personal troubles tends to become irritatingly tedious. The reader’s impatience thus blunts the edge of many startling revelations. In writing her life-story, Katharine Trevelyan obviously wishes to purge herself of all her own unhappiness said at the same time wishes to help others “to contemplate the evolving pattern of their own lives in greater tranquility.” Normal people, especially extroverts, will not be much assisted by Katharine’s disclosures. Nevertheless the book somehow compels attention from the first page to the last. Katharine’s love affairs, her experiences in pre-war Germany, her struggle to live her own destiny certainly make compulsive reading. After the birth of her third baby, she spent seven months in a menial hospital. The way in which she describes from within the patient’s mind every horrifying detail of experience in this institution recalls strongly Janet Frame’s “Faces in the Waiter.” This is not an enjoyable book, but is strikingly original and thoughtprovoking.