UNDERABLE FICION.

Feilding Star, Volume 3, Issue 576, 30 May 1925, Page 2

UNDERABLE FICION.

Some worthy people have been raising an outcry about the mass of “undesirable’’ novels that ale publisued by flic hundred in these days. Ibis “pernicious sex stuff” as its critics call it, has apparently thousands ol readers, and some of it runs in to umpteen editions. Those, who constitute themselves guardians of the public morals talk regretfully of tlie effect of this kind of reading on the plastic mind ol youth, it might- surprise them to know thuu most of the people who eagerly snap up fiction of this hind

are middlc-ayed women, Icadiny placid, irreproachable lives! This is not theory. It is actual fact that can !>•• verifud by a talk with librarians every where. ll is both comic and pathetic to liud how much woiheii make it a point of honour to put such books on their libra! y list! I hey like to be able to talk over the latest shocker with their equally irreproacliahlo li iends. lor whom this sort ol Lliiny spells Id KK. It jiasses oil' their conventional ini elliyence like ami ter oil the proverbia I duck's baek. They remember neither the plots nor the characters; they read so many ol them. Never moved themselves by the faintest stir of impulse to depart from the beaten track of perfect propriety, they nevertheless like 1,0 read about other avoiiicii and men—who do have .such impulses. They like to condemn lliem with bated breath over their teacups and marvel that such i.hinys can be. Hut as to such fiction ‘“inlluoncing” these perfectly c..\c<dlcnt housewives and mothers let the yinrdians of our mixed morality banish I lie thought! They are merely lakiny a peep, so to speak, fhrnuyh the bars of flic psyeholuyieal limn key-house in the human /oo; and afler cacli peep they come back lo I heir own lives Avith a tremendous /est lor clean curtains and nice while quilts.