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Novels and Novelists

A Woman's Book

A Woman's Book

The Book of Youth — By Margaret Skelton

‘The Book of Youth’ is one of those novels which appear from time to time and set the critic wondering what it is in its essential quality that makes him feel so impatient on the one hand and so anxious to deal gently page 188 with it on the other. We are impatient with its sentimentality, its quaint, impossible views of the relationships between man and woman, and its determination that through woman only the wicked world will be saved. We find very hard to bear this trick of simplifying everything, not by making clear, but by faintly blurring—not by taking away, but by adding to. And is it easy to tolerate the author's love for her heroine?—that soft boundless love which sees everything about her glorious, and almost makes us feel that no one woman should ever see another woman cry. We have remarked, in these novels, that the hero is never over-strong. He is an artist, in most cases—a poet, a musician, a painter—and he is pale, with ‘queer’ eyes, easily pleased, easily hurt—a child. We would put our hand upon our heart and swear that he has a tragic, humorous mouth.

For all that, it is difficult to remain cold before the author's enthusiasm. This is her book, these are her people; she is having, as it were, so much the time of her life in describing it all that our withers are wrung at the thought of saying a too-unkind word. If ‘The Book of Youth’ had been half as short; if Miss Margaret Skelton had been content with lakes instead of seas, and storms that threatened rather than broke; if Monica had possessed more of a sense of humour and less of a bubbling laugh—why, then it would not have been ‘The Book of Youth.’ Many thoughts great and small are stalking through the land. We are informed by the cultivated minds of our day that this is no time for artists. Unless a man is willing to sell his soul he will never have the wherewithal to feed and clothe his poor body. We are told also that we are on the eve of a literary renascence. True, no star has been seen in the sky, but the roads are thronged, with shepherds. This is the moment of attention. There never has been such a curious hour, when to-day is not. There was yesterday—there may be to-morrow, but we are assured that is as much as any man dare say.

But Miss Margaret Skelton and her sister writers will page 189 go on producing longer and longer books of their kind, with many a serious chapter in them about sex and social evils, and slumland, and ‘the storm that broke over Europe,’ for ever and ever.

(May 14, 1920.)