WOMAN'S SECRET SOUL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2996, 16 August 1911, Page 84

WOMAN'S SECRET SOUL.

REVELATIONS BY A NOVELIST

What appears to be a very remarkable novel by the Danish woman of letters Karin Michaelis is described in the June Fornightly Review by Miss May Bateman. Though practically unknown to English readers, the works of Karin Michaelis sell in their tens of thousands throughout Central Europe.. This latest book of hers has been translated into French by the famous litterateur, Marcel Prevost, and, under the title of “L’Age Dangereux,” has been appearing fortnightly in La Revue de Paris. The striking feature of the book—which has been discussed quite as much as, if not more than, Marie Claire —is its frank and detailed revelations of feminine nature. “You ■. read ‘L’Age Dangereux’ in Marcel Prevost’s inspired setting,” says Miss Bateman, “and feel—if you are a woman—that your very soul has been stripped bare and then examined under a microscope.” In its every aspect this psychological study is, according to Miss Bateman, essentially feminine, not only in its point of view and its conchsions, but in its -very construction and philosophy of life. Speaking as a woman, she declares that “the poignant truth of it makes you want to hide your eyes at times, as you do when a friend is making some piteous confession which you fear she may regret some day—a confession which incidentally lays bare every half-healed wound of your own.” After 22 years of respectable, but uneventful, married life, Elsie Lindtner, the heroine of “ L’Age Dangereux,” separates from her husband because she has an irresistible desire to live alone. There has been no quarrel. The Lindtners are people of social standing, popular, and well-to-do. Elsie is clever and well preserved, but she is 42, and— The shadow is creeping nearer. Her marriage was one of convenience. She has let life go by, and now it is almost gone, and yet she stands with empty hands. Joergen Malthe loves her, but between them stretches not only the tie of circumstance, the habits of an exemplary lifetime, but the inexorable hand of time, which she knows must separate them eventually, although for . her - sake he detests his own youth, | which she covets. She leaves her home, whether or no she admits it to herself, because she can no longer bear to hear the rustling of the wings of Hope upon her threshold, the hope which, did she hut bid it enter, would change in time into a bird of prey and

devour her. In a villa built for her by the lover to whom she has never given so much as a caress she seeks peace, but finds that she has but exchanged one prison for another. She passes through phase upon phase, mental and physical, but cannot escape from herself. At first she will

have no man about the house. “ A man’s eyes in my house!” she exclaims. ‘‘No, I have seen too much of them.” Again, to quote Miss Bateman : She fights the hidden mysteries of drea.ms and fails. Now the blood runs with incredible swiftness in her veins, her pulses beat with the cruel disquiet of a false youthfulness—now, sudden lassitude falls upon her, and for days she lies not moving upon her bed. . • _ • Step by step the story moves to its anointed end, by means decisive and inevitable. Its peculiar quality of truth, upon which Marcel Prevost lays so much stress, makes it stand out even amongst modem fiction. Given these temperaments—Elsie Lindtner’s, Joergen Malthe’s, Richard Lindtner’s, —and no other result is possible except the one which, almost up to the last page, you hope may be averted. The loser pays in life, and the loser is nearly always the woman.

A great deal of the social charm of the book seems to consist in its curious form. Now it is written as a journal, now as a series of letters, and now as a mere call into the void. The form helps the author to her intimate revelation of the feminine soul. As Miss Bateman points out, women are secretive, especially in their dealings with men, even with their lovers, and what Marcel Prevost calls “ the freemasonry of the sex ” tends to make the novelists among them conceal their most intimate thoughts. Karin Michaelis is clearly an exception. She has no such reticence, and that is what makes “ L’Age Dangereux ” unique in literature. Miss Bateman sums up in the following passage the significance of the book from the point of view of a clever woman who has herself reached the “ age of danger ” : The real fight, the real fear, the real motive, the worst pain—to whom do we reveal these things? One woman who feels deeply will divine them in another who feels deeply, merely because she is a woman, but her heart’s beloved will never realise the crises her soul has to pass through before peace can come to it as a possession, Mrs Craigie’s life and letters proe how lonely an adored and brilliant woman may be interiorly. Even the Mother of God kept things hidden in her heart. Karin Michaelis has—to use a slang term—given us away on many points. 'She says certain things which I at least have never sees actuall- put in words ; she admiis certain essentially feminine fears and nightmares which women only speak of to each other with closed doors. Only a woman can disclose the inmost sanctuary of a woman’s heart, and that it should be revealed at all is something of a shock to those who have hitherto looked upon the sanctuary as inviolate. The book is r»t one for schoolroom misses assuredly, but it contains nothing that an honest writer or reader need regret having written or read—keen, pitiless even, as is Karin Michaelfs’s analysis of the foibles and coquetries of her sex. Miss Bateman expects certain passages to be deleted wholesale before the book is presented in an English guise, but at the same time declares that any man who read it in the hope of finding anything unsavoury would be disappointed.