Books.

Radio Record, Volume II, Issue 11, 9 November 1928, Page 13

Books.

THE ENGLISH MISS. -.-

R. H.

Mottram

S a successor to Mr. Mottram’s penetrating analysis of the character of Flemish Madeleine Vandertyden, his "l’Anglaise’" comes in the nature of a disappointment. In this portrait of a girl of the English middle Glass, although her outlook and idliosyneracies are delineated with sympathy and vision, and her sane simplicity emphasised, the author entirely ignores those complexities of the eternal feminine which continue to exist in spite of wars and rumours of wars, past, present and to come. To be clean, well exercised, and do her job as well as possible, these are the ideals of Mr. Mottram’s Marny; who is conscientious, efficient, a fair and fragrant maiden, quite strangely indifferent to the things of the spirit. After budding years spent in a poarding-school (admirably sketched), without either enthusiam or distate, the girl works for a time in war service organisations, and then goes to France to visit the grave of him who won her austere young heart. During a short and distressful sojourn she discovers that her Rex has had a sordid intrigue with a vulgar and promiscuous "bonne," in whose baby’s cradle Marny discovers the love mascotte she gave to her soldier lover the day he left her to join his regiment. There are some arresting vignettes of the life of Suburbia, in and out of war-time, minor characters heing meticulously observed and limned with insight and understanding. Plump Mr. Proudfoot is true to type as ineptly he philanders on the edge of the primrose path; so is "Auntie," his motherly spouse, who "glitters and tinkles, and is essentially a woman, who has to think hard; and put on a good deal, in order to look well." The quiet English father, devoted to the memory of his virl-wife, is in deed and in truth a prince of parents; of commendable courtesy in "doing out the duty" of daily domesticity, while displaying rare and enviable tact in consoling his daughter in her inarticulate sorrow. and a sympathetic comprehension when finally she responds to a patientlv adoring and not very convincing American medico, her comrade in war and peace, who is laconic and unimaginative as the English Miss herself. — R.U.R.