Woman's Byron

GLORIOUS APOLLO -- E. Barrington -- Dodd Mead ($2.50). It is 101 years last Easter Monday since George Gordon

Noel Lord Byron laid down his pen and his life of a Greek fever in the embattled swamps of Missolonghi. The present bio-novel might be regarded as a belated contribution to the centenary, atoning for its tardiness by its fervor. But such is hardly the case. The author of The Chaste Diana (Lavinia Fenton, later the Duchess of Bolton, who took the part of Polly Peachum in the original production of the Beggars' Opera) and The Divine Lady (Lady Hamilton), is a person who discerns the folly of conceiving a colorful biography and embroidering it to the current taste in refined wantonness, when History's closet affords the skeletons of many such-- authentic shades already advertised, even to an ill-schooled generation. She (internal evidence fixes the gender) has but to draw about the rummaged bones their traditional glamour, judiciously intensified and sympathetically explained. So here we have a florid Woman's Byron, contrived by a rather superior Elinor Glyn, who assures the finicky that she departs from historic truth "never knowingly," without once removing her rapt and gleaming eye from the hungry hosts of spinsters and pensive wives who will embrace her hero, "so winning, so unwon," in raptures which the poet's fame will certainly excuse.

Divorce-Victim

THE KENWORTHYS--Margaret Wilson --Harper ($2.00). The lives of some commonfolk are here dammed up into tragedy by the rather rickety proposition that it is dishonorable for a man to exert any extra-legal effort to recover, from his rich, reprehensible, divorced wife, the custody of their unhappy child. Author Wilson* was awarded the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the simplicity and directness of The Able McLaughlins. Simple in diction is The Kenworthys and fairly direct in presentation. But only a patient reader will penetrate the morasses of reiterative dialog, will take the scanted, arbitrary motives on faith, will 'ignore loose ends and faulty emphases and win through to the central piece of work that recommends the book. The characterization of gangling young Bronson Kenworthy, precocious, perverse, love-starved divorce-victim, is striking. He is brought up by a devoted chauffeur. He glowers at the world through thick glasses. He kicks, punches, smokes black cigars at 14, reviles his mother's name. His father and Aunt Emily slowly humanize him. He dies of pneumonia at precisely the right moment to make the thwarted lives and love of those two seem quite noble--but a little absurd.

*Not to be confused with Margaret Woodrow Wilson, eldest daughter of the late President, who is in the advertising business.