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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

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19320312.2.89

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 13

Word count
Tapeke kupu
400

Untitled Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 13

Untitled Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 13

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