Wayward and capricious heroines who marry young are entitled, I think, to a certain amount of introspective treatment by their authors.  Without some knowledge of their mental working it is not very easy for the reader to have patience with them.  I was introduced to Anne (HEINEMANN) when she was fifteen, and in the act of snatching a loaf of bread from a baker’s cart and running away with it merely to annoy the baker; and, as she had large blue eyes and two young men as self-appointed guardians, I was prepared for a certain amount of heart trouble later on.  One of these heroes she married at the age of seventeen, and, after various innocent but compromising vagaries (including a flight to Paris after the death of her son in order to study art), she followed the other one, still innocently, to Ireland, because he had been in prison and she was sorry for him.  Both these guardians discharged their duty to Anne at least as well as OLGA HARTLEY, who chronicles but does not explain; and this is a pity, for with a rather different treatment she might have made her heroine a very likeable person.  Looked at from another point of view, Anne may be taken as a mild piece of propaganda against divorce.  I am glad it didn’t come to that, of course, but I do feel that a cross-examining K.C. would have discovered a good deal more about Anne’s soul for me than I learnt from the writer of her story.

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John Fitzhenry (MILLS AND BOON) is one of those pleasant stories about people who live in big country houses, a subject that seems to have a particular attraction for the large and ungrudging public which lives in villas.  We have already several novelists who tell them very ably, and I feel that some one among them has served as Miss ELLA MACMAHON’S model.  The tale deals with the affairs of a showy fickle cousin and a silent constant cousin who compete for the love of the same delightful if rather nebulous young woman, and moves to its denouement, against a background of the great War, which Miss MACMAHON has very sensibly decided to view entirely from the home front.  It contains some fine thinking and some bad writing (the phrase telling of the middle-aged smart woman who “waved her foot impatiently” gives a just idea of the author’s occasional inability to say what she means), some quite extraneous incidents and some scenes very well touched in.  The people, with a few exceptions, are of the race which inhabits this sort of book, and, as we have long agreed with our novelists that “the county” is just like that, I don’t see why Miss MACMAHON should be blamed for it.

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