THE AUTOBBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 13, 16 January 1932, Page 14 (Supplement)

THE AUTOBBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

From Airs. Belloc Lowndes’ London letter to the Saturday Review of Literature: — The autobiographical novel remains always in fashion, partly because it is often the only kind of novel that an accomplished and brilliant writer can write. The true creative gift is curiously rare, and certainly cannot be achieved either by taking pains, or by the old method of praying and fasting. But in modern conditions of publishing, the extraordinary increase in, and demand for, fiction of every kind, has come to mean that an intensive search for “something or someone to write about,” as it was put to me the other day by one of the more distinguished of our younger novelists, makes it irresistibly tempting to take not only real life, but real characters as models. Too often the result conies perilously near to caricature, to the anger and surprise of those w'ho regard themselves as the victims, rather than as the sitters, to

painters in words. Of all living Englishwomen, the one who has appeared most often in fiction within three reigns—an extraordinary tribute to her vitality and vivid personality—is the Countess of Oxford ('Margot Asquith). There was a delightful picture of her as a young woman in “Isabel Carnaby,” a w'itty novel by Ellen Thornycroft Fowler. Then came “Dodo,” in which not only the Alargot Tennant of that day, but also another figure not less vital, that of the composer, Aliss Ethel Smythe, was some would say, caricatured. At least two incidents in the future Airs. Asquith’s girlhood were used by Airs. Humphry Ward in “The Marriage of William Ashe.” In fact, the novelist, in that story, made a skilful amalgam of Lady Caroline Lamb and the then Alargot Tennant. There are three other books in which the same personality obviously suggested one of the characters.