"THE HUGE SHIPWRECK"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22030, 9 February 1935, Page 9 (Supplement)

"THE HUGE SHIPWRECK"

A RESTRAINED NOVEL Miss Kathleen Freeman has written a novel of restricted emotion which has been described as approaching the Greek literary technique. Although the writer's researches entailing the " Life of Solon " must have brought her considerably in touch with the Greek world, there is little that approximates in any way to the Greek ideal in her work. However, it is a very readable book and is in many ways extremely unusual. The book tells the story of Estella Benington from her childhood through the long drawn out school years to womanhood; and through it all, the emotional development of her reserved, self-contained nature is traced with the fineness of conception which makes ue believe it is a portrait, if not indeed a mirror, of the author's- own emotional experience. Estella is given to hero worship, but her worship is reserved for one or two; her parents are dim and shadowy; they enter not at all into the affections of this strange little girl. Her love is given first to Veronica, a school friend some years her senior and then to Tobias who loves only Veronica. Sadie Westmacott, Veronica's friend, whose dark, passionate beauty, whose ruthlesness and determination flash vividly across the pages, is the third character deeply entwined in the emotional triangle which begins to develop during the schooldays of the three girls and comes to a climax in the last part of the. book. The school life, though very well done, occupies too large a proportion of this novel, whose balance is thus upset. The last 30 pages wherein adolescence is past and the gathering emotional storm breaks in tragic fury 011 Estella's calm, cameo-like head is exceedingly well sustained and when the book is closed one craves for more, or rather, wishes that Miss Freeman had not spent so much of her talent on schoolgirls when their maturity offers a wider field for her delicate yet convincing pen. It is a novel whose purity appeals in an age considerably lacking in reserve, and Miss Freeman is to be commended for the austerity and beauty of her conception.

" The Huge, Shipwreck," by Kathleen Freeman. (Dent.)