Digest

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 15

Digest

HE NBS production, Some Great Women Treated Lightly — scarcely lived up to its title in the case of Mary Shelley. Nobody could treat Mary Shelley lightly; nor did the author of this fragment do so, although he used the futuristic medium of the time-space-reporter to contact his subject. When J say that Mary Shelley’s life and parentage, her love and literary output, her husband’s character and genius, their remarkable ménage a trois with stepsister Clare, their famous friends and acquaintances, were all treated rapidly and succinctly in less than half-an-hour. it will be apparent that "sketchily" rather than "lightly" might have been the designation, What was packed into the too-short time, however, was enough to fill the listener with a desire for more, which is after all the main object of such a series. "Mary Shelley, her life and times" would indeed, if treated with the expansion such a subject deserves, fill many half-hours to the exclusion of other entertainment, and the reader can and should follow such a broadcast by intensive reading, But I was left with a tantalised feeling that more could have been done with minor details, which was unreasonable of me. For example-"Trelawny wanted me to marry him" says the widowed. Mary Trelawny has necessarily to be dismissed in a couple of sentences-that amazing creature whose exotic and exciting life was an epitome of the whole romantic movement. I hope someone

some day will devote a whole play to Trelawny; a three-acter would indeed be scarcely long enough to contain all of him.