HIGH REGENCY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 529, 12 August 1949, Page 16

HIGH REGENCY

LADY ANNE BARNARD. By Madeleine tee Allen and Unwin. Enélish price, GREAT lady with something of the qualities of a Lady Hester Stanhope or a Princess Lieven (of whom she was a contemporary), Lady Anne Lindsay somehow failed to tattle her way into fame. She devoted her love to a statesman who avoided marrying her, her intellect to another, who made use of her and. gave little in return. Neither the cultivated young girl who wrote Auld Robin Gray, nor the conscientious, elderly wife of dull Andrew Barnard was Anne’s idea of herself and her destiny. Indeed, she failed rather dismally as a manipulator of events perhaps because she had too much good nature. But Madeleine Masson ‘abundantly :aakes’plain that she was a pertson of charm, wit and ability. Considerable areas of this biography are left obscure; the writer gives the impression of being out of her depth when ‘she attempts a general picture of Regency society; and there is too much

naive racing away after stray moths of pointless gossip. Lady Barnard’s brief residence at the Cape no doubt made her interesting to a South African, and this part of her life, well described and well illustrated, has mofe vitality than anything else in the book. The thanks to librarian and, archivists, the bibliography (without dates or editions), and the intermittent (but incomplete and teasing): footnotes give an appearance of scholarship which is belied by the processions of clichés, the misspellings, and the atrocious proof reading. Yet, in spite of its blemishes, Lady Anne’s biography shows an awareness of the psychological possibilities of its subject. It would have been a better |

book as a novel,

David

Hall