Books: British Hybrid

HONORABLE ESTATE—Vera Brittain—Macmillan ($2.50).

In her best-selling autobiography, Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain tried to “describe and assess the fate of a young generation ignorantly and involuntarily caught” in the chaos of the War and post-War years. Last week this earnest British writer offered a novel with a theme no less ambitious but a good deal less sharply defined: the relation of the feminist movement, the War and changing social standards to “the private destinies of individuals.” The result is another of those curious hybrid volumes that have recently become numerous in English writing—a long (601 pages), formless book, half-tract and half-fiction, slightly radical, a little scandalous by pre-War standards, not quite a sentimental story, somewhat highbrow, almost good.

A cut above its predecessors in its sincerity and candor, Honorable Estate is like them in the number of its characters as well as in the grim picture of English social decay that it communicates. It tells two major stories: one of Janet Rutherston, confused, vacillating, dissatisfied wife of a pompous churchman; the other of Ruth Alleyndene, intelligent, sensitive daughter of a manufacturer, who marries Janet’s son. Janet’s story, occupying the first part of the book, is the more convincing and original, despite the facts that it is mixed up with long digressions about the suffraget movement and that it is told largely by means of excerpts from Janet’s diary. An orphan, marrying at 19 and bearing an unwanted child to a man she did not love, Janet had the additional ill luck to be given an inquiring and unconventional mind in an environment where any unprecedented action created talk. She tormented the Vicar with her peace meetings and suffraget agitation as much as he tormented her with his prejudices, his temper, his complaints that she had ruined his career. Only her deep friendship for a dour Scottish spinster, whose plays became successful, saved her, and when they quarreled over votes-for-women Janet was completely broken. She tried to set fire to her husband’s church, drove him out of his mind, worked in a settlement house until her early death.

Meanwhile Ruth Alleyndene had been painfully growing up in a prosperous household to which the Vicar preached for a time. She went to Oxford, became a War nurse, learned that her brother had been on the verge of being disgraced for his homosexuality before he was killed in action, fell in love with a cheerful, courageous Harvard graduate who was serving with the British troops. Readers accustomed to scathing portraits of U. S. citizens in British and European fiction are likely to be taken aback by Vera Brittain’s eloquent, recurring, heartfelt tributes to U. S. generosity, youth, bravery, virility, as well as by the strange slang she attributes to her U. S. characters. Ruth gives herself to her U. S. lover, is heart broken after his death in the Argonne that she did not bear his child. On a famine relief mission in Russia after the War, she meets Janet’s son, marries him, plunges into politics, finds a measure of peace.