Book Reviews

Hutt News, Volume 13, Issue 41, 3 April 1940, Page 1

Book Reviews

(By "Calliope.")

Laura Goodman Salverson, whose book "The Dark Weaver" was granted the Governor - General's Award for the best Canadian fiction, of 1937, tells the story of her varied fortunes in "Confessions of an Immigrants Daughter|" Following a impulse, her parents, of the last of the Viking noble®, migrated -to Canada.

The book "goes on to relate the authoress's experiences as a professional dancer, amounts her various love affairs and tells of several' years of gruelling work in Canadian houses and factories. After her marriage to a compatriot ,Mrs. Salverson begins the painful process of learning English, a study which later leads to the writing of the books which have made her famous.

The strange and varied tales she has to tell, her powers of vivid description and her fixedness of purpose in everything she does, make "Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter" a book well worth reading.

■' Sandra Glenn is the attractive narde of an equally attractive young London business girl who glveß up a well-paid secretaryship in the hope of pleasing her fiance's snobbish mother. She is so rudely treated at Rodwick Hall, the Templeton's home, that she breaks her engagement arm leaves after oflly a few days. She intends to throw herself upon the generosity of her flat mate until something turns up, but op the train journey back to Paddington circumstances throw her into the of a man who is shortly sailing for Rhodesia. As an alternative to staying in bleak, cold London, with humiliating memories of her failure at Rodwick Hall, Sandra follows a sudden impulse, and decides to accompany him to South Africa as companionsecretary. This is the ploAof Emmeline Morrison's unusual r Jfel "Sandra." J Frequently a person who has climbed to a vantage point of years can look back over the panorama of his past and point unerringly to a day, a word or an act which has changed the entire course of his life. In such an event every word and action takes on a deep significance which etches it indelibly upon his memory, so that ever afterwards that day remains -more vivid than the* shifting hours of the present.

It is this fact that/enables Melina Rorke to describe with wonderful clarity the fateful day of 1881) on tfhich she escaped from the South African Convent to elope with Frederick Rorke, a visiting iinglish football player. She was only 14 years of age at the time, and she was a widow and mother at the age of 13.

This is but the beginning of l>er life of strange adventures; later she leaves her Kimberley home and, taking her small son with her, accompanies her brother on a trek, through Pretoria and then straight north into the wilderness. Later she started a nursing home in Bulawayo, and her experiences range from a devastating locust plague to native uprisings, and a narrow escape from death at the hands of her own servant.

She did heroic work in the hospitals in the Boer War, was with the force that relieved Mafeking, and was later honoured by BadenPowell and decorated by King Edward VII with the Order of. th<> Royal Red Cross.