WHEN WOMAN WRITES

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 150, 21 March 1925, Page 15

WHEN WOMAN WRITES

THE DYNAMO BEHIND HER BOOKS

In the course of tn article in "John o’ London’s Weekly” contrasting the way in which men and women novelists , write, a well-known reviewer coni- ' ments as follows:— "The man-writer’s book finished, he usually neatly’ tucks in all loose ends. The woman is inclined to look upon . their negligent display as part of a i wider realism. She has no wish to produce a collection *c( stock size . models, hardly distinguishable from one another. " Hence the .reader may ‘ feel sure that to read half a dozen, say, of Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith’s books, will explain oracularly a great part of Miss Kaye-Smith’s intellectual and spiritual growth. To read half a dozen of Mr. Galsworthy's novels, however, is a much less progressive study, for the first is certain to contain him. The essential man—one reverts to speaking of the sex—is less subject than the artist to change. "It is not difficult to find recent and (promising first .novels by women which assert that desire to be something more universal than a writer of autobiography. . "There was ‘Broken Bridges, the faults in this picturesque scrap from a girl’s lite were almost part of its attraction, and in her second book, 'The Roadside Fire,’ Miss Madeleine Linford has well used her . gift of rich phrasing and her emotional sincerity to illustrate the tragedy and the adrenture of relief work in Poland. And, less recentlv, there was 'The Glorious Thing,’ Miss Christine Orr’s limited but ixtremely sympathetic study, of young Edinburgh in wartime. This book, me showing real balance and restraint, has been overshadowed by its succes-

lor, ‘Kate Curlew.’ "More ardently and fiercely modern, , passionately contemporary, Mrs. Kean Seymour has published three novels of unCommon merit. Many admirers give ‘lntrusion’ the highest place. In this, ns in Mrs. Seymour’s other books, there Is intellectual enjoyment of life, there is pathos, there is vivid characterisation. The result is a picture which is as fine and ingenious and romantic as art can be Ohich makes no serious effort to see life as a battle of invisible ■nd spiritual forces, whose darkness requires explanation or light. “Should ‘this attempt at judgment appear an inadequate scramble among impressions, it must be remembered that those novelists who do in some respect illuminate that battle have yet to be spoken of and spoken of in more detail. There is Miss Rose Macaulav. One may be annoved by her novels, one may be wearied to exasperation by those ‘brilliant’ and ‘satiric’ qualities which her publisher has so obliginglv recapitulated at the opening of ‘Told by an Idiot’; but Miss Macaulay is good for our souls. She is a spiritual problem. The anxiety—how she would hate it!—which she provokes in the minds of her readers is divided between her own career and the tragic futility and chaos of the post-war world which she reproduces with an interest which is partly disgust. “Sometimes it is through the medium of its very young investigators that she lavs bare the diseased organism of society; and horrid young peo- ’ pie they are, who never pause to be thankful for the chocolates,and univer- 1

ary posts with which Providence and industrialism have endowed them. Behind these, however, sit that familiar circle of elderly young people with whom we soon become familiar, the sensitive, intetactnal '•ristocrat. with cold faces and frosty blue eves and thin lips that twist easily to pain or laughter. The” suffer a great deal, because the conscience of the world is lulled to sleep by the Potter Press, and by vulgar fears and sentimentalities and greed and a hatred of truth. . , . “Very much more perplexing because so much more impersonal, are Miss Kaye-Smith’s novels. The spectacle of actual life, its painful mistakes, its lack of discrimination and its crushing inequalities, as we see them expressed each morning in the ‘Times,’ appears to lie remote from her characters, even when their lives are caught into some national crisis or movement of thought. . . .- “A temper very closely related to this consummate neutrality belongs to the small group of novels by Miss Constance Holme. These are surprisingly unfamiliar even to critical and exploring readers. They are “ ‘retired as noontide dew, Or fountain in a noonday grove.’ “An amazing independence and de tachment envelops these stories of Westmorland. The captains and the kings whose unreasonable political actions break the hearts of Miss Macaulav’s intelligentsia are never mentioned, and although these are stories of a particular corner of England it is not handled, as Sussex is handled by Miss Kaye-Smith. ‘The Lonely Plough,’ indeed, which some have judged to be Miss Holme’s finest work, is the story of the (destruction of the sea-wall which had been left untouched because Lanty Lancaster preferred to have faith in his dead father’s work, and to live out, in tragic disappointment, the proof of his own belief that ‘it is better to keep trust and be betrayed—ay 1 better even to- betray trust in keeping trust, than never to have trust at all.’ "This faith of one man in another, an incentive to service and an influence to keep life wholesome, is one of the principles which control Miss Holm’s characters. Her later books, however—‘Beautiful End,’ ‘The Splendid Fairing,’ ‘The Trumpet in the Dust’— explain the dignity and the tragedy of very simple lives and wisely unlettered minds. These three books deal each with the events of one day. They are tragic, but never gloomy, for in each of them some character preserves an unfettered and radiant faith in the power of the unseen, unrealised dreams of good which should guide human life.

“A study of anv of the books here referred to ought to convince the just reader that it would be difficult to collect an equal number of novels written bv men, not veterans in their calling, which should reveal more artistic sincerity and moral and intellectual courage,” concludes Miss Dalglish.