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THE HOUSE OF LEE--Gertrude Atherton--Appleton-Century ($2.50).

If the War Between Men and Women, foreseen by the mad fancy of James Thurber, comes to pass, Gertrude Atherton will be the Stonewall Jackson of the rebel females. The House of Lee, a tale of a girl of 22, her mother of 40, her grandmother of 60, is not so noteworthy because of its strident feminism as because of its rampant, 82-year-old author.

Eight years after the gold rush, Gertrude Franklin Horn was born in San Francisco of a drunken father, a hysterical mother. At 17, gay, giddy Gertrude eloped with one of her divorced mother's suitors, sulky, jealous, half-Spanish George Atherton, who had Spanish ideas on the subjugation of women. When he died in 1887 and was shipped home from Chile in a barrel of rum, his young widow had learned little respect for men or for marriage.

When she began writing, her mother-in-law insisted, "I no believe the womens can write. If all were known, you find the mens write those books for them." Gertrude Atherton spent the next half-century defying the mens and her mother-in-law. Literature, like the stage, was a low, unladylike profession. Her first novel was the scandal of California society in 1892. She was probably the first refined U. S. female to smoke a cigaret in public: women fainted, men boiled, editors sizzled, preachers raged.

Her early books, scorned by U. S. critics, were warmly received, like their author, in England, where she fascinated Thomas Hardy with descriptions of San Francisco's cable cars, described George Moore as "a codfish crossed by a satyr." The Conqueror (1902), a life of Alexander Hamilton, generated a whole school of romantic, novelized biography.

At 64, feeling her creative power had dried up, she had her ovaries stimulated by X-ray and promoted rejuvenation in a novel, Black Oxen (1923). Whatever the source of her second vigor, yellow-haired, red-nailed Octogenarian Atherton has injected a good deal of it into The House of Lee. When the family fortune of the well-bred San Francisco Lees collapses, Lucy Lee, Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Edington set about to earn their own livings with glares at Labor and the New Deal. Mrs. Edington rejects a $100,000 cinema offer, strides firmly through her world of clubs and the Women's Chamber of Commerce, creates a fine job for herself at the age of 60. Mild Mrs. Lee teaches bridge to the new-rich. Brash young Lucy resolves to have a career before marriage, teaches tennis, finds fear of a Chinatown plot leading her into the arms of her patient suitor. Though The House of Lee will scarcely be immortal, Gertrude Atherton herself seems to have a pretty good chance.

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