Interest in the present and future state of the novel continues unabated in England. Mr J. B. Priestley has been predicting that this year -we shall see inoTe of the strong sense of character atjd the mingling of humorous pnd romantic elements which have been the splendid tradition of the English novelqualities which suffered a temporary eclipse during the recent peevish postwar period, but have been emerging during the last year or two; and Mr T. Eftrle Welby recently expressed regret tl»at so many of the cleverer novelists of to-day are perversely nn . doing the sound work of Trollope, in Trollope, he says, we have a perfect and thoroughly English proof that the novelist can. do without brains if fce possesses genius, but in some of our younger contemporary novelists we liavo an unsuccessful and un-English attempt to prove that if the novelist has brains lie can do without everything else. The ' | "London Mercury" raises a slighter criticism and warns novelists that there , is just now among them a yogue in titles that, if they but knew it, is not. only a disadvantage to the general public, but a very grave disadvantage to the writers themselves. It is th a habit of giving their novels titles that are mere vague phrases which have tis power to fix themselves in the memory and which no one can recall in a taw months' time. Alec Waugh's "So Lovers Dream" is instanced as a ease in point. As for women novelists, in particular, a writer in the "Daily Herald" declared that it was largely . the efforts of women writers that sent llie novel off 'the "guff" standard towards the close of last year. Their eye for detail and colour, their im- i patience with prejudice, their ab- , horrenee of the sloppy and the slipshod, i their consistent workmanship, all helped • to make fiction eaner. Then a few days i later, in the same paper, Mr Gilbert < Frankau replied sliarplv that women j cannot write novels. They analyse to • a hair, but synthesis is beyond therfi. ' Mr Norman Collins, in the "News- | Ohroniolo," stated a fairly useful para- ( dos: Women novelists, he said, have ( one thing in common with men, and that . is that they have nothing in common. , People w ho generalise disparagingly | about "the woman novelist of to-day," < as though they were only one, forget < the others as they forget themselves. | i
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Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 13
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400Untitled Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 13
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