DECLINE OF SEX NOVEL

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 117, 13 November 1926, Page 20

DECLINE OF SEX NOVEL

HAPPY AND CHEERFUL ROMANCES MORE DESIRED.

Booksellers, and librarians are being naked for something other, than sex novels (writes '-, G. H. Grubb, in the •'Daily Express")- This means that the novel-readiiig public have' ! had enough of the;- sex-problem story. They ask for a gorid; clean, happy" romance.. They fgar that the indiscriminate moral attitude of their young people may, to some extent^ arise from the many injudicious volumes of fiction that have been current for some years. The number of manuscripts devoted to sex topics .is decreasing. Since the war we havo.had a galaxy of neurotic sentiment. Emotion, unnatural, without a constructive thrill, in some cases_ replete with nausebus suggestion, void of all the:' higher values of .the grea# commandments of fiction, has made us look back with longing to the ■ wonders of such novelists of the past as Bichardson, Trollope, Thackeray, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, and a few others, and of our day, Hardy and Galsworthy. I think we are just about tired ol it, and many are looking for a new phase It is on the way. Soon we shall see a growing demand for the simplo love story. People want a change. The sex novel has had a great innings, and the end of its career is fast approaching. Nothing may withstand public opinion. In the last two or three years I recall four distinctive —there are others- —novels of the new type which have all had' particularly good sales. They are excellent in every wav — we n written, good stories, with natural characters and happy backgrounds. They are Colonel Wren's adventurous "Beau Geste"—he has just followed it with another—Miss. Warner's "Lolly AYillowes," Denis Mackail's "Greenery Street"— the best book of its kind since "The Little White Bird" —and Miss Klickman's •'The Carillon of Serapa."