Ladies'-Book

A SEA ISLAND LADY-- Francis Griswold-- Morrow ($3).

The publishers of A Sea Island Lady were sufficiently confident of its future to run off four printings (11,300 copies) in advance of publication date, to set aside $3,500 for publicity, to blurb its heroine as "unforgettable." To early readers of the novel it was evident that this confidence was going to be abundantly justified, for two large reasons: 1) that the U. S. book-buying public is by large majority composed of women, and: 2) that it would be hard to imagine a book better qualified to delight that majority.

Subsidiary reasons: A Sea Island Lady is 964 pages long and weighs 2 Ibs. 10 1/2 oz. It is written in that tireless, fluescent, infallibly platitudinous language which commonly passes for "literature," and in whose terms Joyce, in Ulysses, created Gerty MacDowell.*

After 260 pages of ingratiating and painful romance, in the reliably glamorous Civil War-Reconstruction setting, Heroine Emily Fenwick settles down to her real business. That is, for 700 pages and 60 years more, to live out the whole vast length of her life, the trivial with the towering, the bitter with the sweet, as the essential Perfect Woman; married, raising a family, standing at the center of its vicissitudes, learning, at the end, to "believe at last with whole heart in all the dark splendor, all the terrible beauty of the world." Her flawless marriage darkens and dulls, her bachelor friend is lost to death, found again in spirit, her husband dissolves into alcohol and she brings him through, her daughter dies in childbed, the Lusitania sinks, the promising son turns out disappointingly, Harding is elected, widowed Emily Fenwick meets old age. . . .

Though A Sea Island Lady never in any direction exceeds what its audience can take, it rarely eases up short of that. Within those limits it is extraordinarily warm, full, and actual, and by bulk alone gathers an enormous and serene momentum that ends by making the story seem as real and immediate as air. To the proper reader, Emily Fenwick becomes a useful magic mirror for solace, nostalgia, future-gazing, and self-comparison.

In a letter, Joyce describes the style as "namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy. . . ."

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