Cycle a Woman

YEARS OF GRACE -- Margaret Ayer Barnes--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50). Longer than most of today's novels, Years of Grace is not quite long enough to take in its heroine's full life. Jane Ward is 14 when her story opens in the '90s, a grandmother when it ends, still hale if not as hearty as she has been. Jane is the younger daughter of a well-to-do conservative Chicago family. When she falls in love with Andre, 19-year-old French boy who wants to be a sculptor, her parents forbid them to see each other. Later Jane marries Stephen, a perfectly respectable match, but is never really in love with him. In her long married life she has only one affair, with the never-do-well husband of one of her best friends, but after he has kissed her she sends him away, never sees him again. In her late middle age, in Paris (where she has gone for the wedding of her divorced daughter to her divorced nephew), she meets her first love, Andre, again. He is now a famous sculptor. They are both shocked at the change in each other: he cynically, she more wisely, sadly.

A motor accident in France three years ago made Margaret Ayer Barnes an author: in bed for months, she wrote to give herself something to do. Chicago socialite, sister of Novelist Janet Fairbank. Authoress Barnes was formerly a director of Bryn Mawr College. Her short stories have been published under the title Prevailing Winds. Years of Grace is her first novel.

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