Literary Review Index
A Selection of Feminist and Woman-Focused Literary Reviews and Features from Time and Tide, May 1920-December 1929
Compiled by Victoria Kennedy
1920
14 May 1920, p. 7-8
Article on American writer Elizabeth Robins. She championed the plays of Henrik Ibsen at a time when the general public derided him, and she is particularly remembered for her performance as Hedda Gabler. She wrote a play called Votes for Women.
14 May 1920, p. 9
Article by Alice Meynell on Fanny Burney’s Evelina. Meynell criticizes Burney for creating in Evelina a vain daydream of widespread male admiration and says that she “betrayed at one blow many generations of schoolgirls.” Jane Austen’s works are considered better because they convey satire, whereas Meynell sees no satire in Evelina.
2 July 1920, p. 169
Rose Macaulay’s review of The Foolish Lovers by St. John Ervine focuses on the presence of sex and romance in the story. Also reviewed: E. M. Delafield’s Tension.
16 July 1920, p. 204-205
“Personalities and Powers: Miss Rebecca West.” On West and her novel Return of the Soldier: “For a popular writer, she takes life very hard.” “Of late years she has concentrated on literary matters that are often of an unattractive reconditeness.” “Miss West is outspoken as instinctively as a canary sings or a lion roars.” “It is quite easy to imagine her a contemporary of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.”
6 August 1920, p. 271
“The Amazing Feminist” by A. D. A. An article which argues that Byron is more feminist than most critics hold.
1 October 1920, p. 431-432
Rose Macaulay’s book reviews: Our Women: Chapters on the Sex Discord by Arnold Bennett and The Good Englishwoman by Orlo Williams. Reflects on men’s interest in writing about women, but asserts that “man (anyhow, on paper) dislikes and despises woman.”
8 October 1920, p. 443-445
George Bernard Shaw’s essay, “Woman Since 1860.” Personal reflections on women and changes in gender relations. Shaw focuses on changes in women’s clothing and mannerisms over the decades since his youth and he concludes that “the sexes wear different boots and bonnets, not different souls.”
8 October 1920, p. 453
“Correspondence.” Two letters to the editor that take issue with Rose Macaulay’s treatment of Arnold Bennett’s Our Women in the previous week’s edition. Both letters take issue with the fact that Macaulay says it is a given fact that men are, generally, more intelligent than women.
26 November 1920, p. 589-590
“Some of Our Younger Poets” by Margaret Wynne Nevinson. This review focuses on female poets and calls attention to the difficulties women writers face by referring to them as “many mute but glorious Miltons.” It also highlights feminist issues that appear in women’s writing. The review offers excerpts from poems by Anna Wickham, Irene McLeod, Grace Fallow Norton, and Rose Macaulay.
3 December 1920, p. 607-608
“Some of Our Younger Poets” by Margaret Wynne Nevinson. Continued discussion of female poets. Edith Sitwell, Iris Tree, Susan Miles, H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], Helen Parry Eden, Muriel Stuart, Lady Margaret Sackville.
3 December 1920, p. 614-615
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s highly positive review of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Hamilton calls it “a novel about real people in a real and poignant situation, seen with that intensity of vision which makes the whole not a demonstration but a work of art.”
17 December 1920, p. 651
Notice of the December 11th death of Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of a South African Farm and Woman and Labour.
24 December 1920, p. 683-684
“Browning—As Love-Poet” by Frances Tyrrell. The second half of article deals with Robert Browning’s attitude toward women. Tyrrell asserts that “his vision of woman’s place in the scheme of things must have been much at variance with the texture of social opinion, at the time of his first utterances.”
31 December 1920, p. 712-713
Article on Olive Schreiner by Lady Constance Lytton. “She was the very centre and life of the Woman’s Suffrage movement in South Africa.”
1921
14 January 1921, p. 41-42
Rose Macaulay’s highly positive review of Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield. Macaulay praises Mansfield’s gift for “individual psychology” and notes that in most of the stories there is “a sense of unbearable tension” which “comes from the fact that Miss Mansfield is concerned, in most of these stories, with nerves strained almost to breaking-point.”
21 January 1921, p. 65
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of A Survey of English Literature, 1830-1880 by Oliver Elton includes some criticism of Elton’s treatment of female authors. “As, in his former volume, he seemed hardly to respond as delightedly as one could have hoped to the genius of Jane Austen, so here he seems oddly cold before the fiery passion of Emily and Charlotte Brontë.”
18 February 1921, p. 163-164
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s book reviews on women and work: Women and Trade Unions by Barbara Drake, Advancing Woman by Holford Knight, The Girl by Katherine Dewar, The Cries in Russia by Arthur Ransome, and The Frontier of Control by C. L. Goodrich.
1 April 1921, p. 304-306
“Personalities and Powers: The Thorndikes, Sybil and Russell." The author states that "to the judicious, it was not the calculated thrill in G.H.Q. Love which was the attraction, but the sympathetic intuition with which Sybil Thorndike sketched a life-like portrait of one of those wretched women who can no longer find customers for the sale of the goods which were eagerly demanded when in the hey-day of their physical attraction they began to ply their trade." The article also features a brief discussion of The Tragedy of Mr. Punch in which Sybil played a marionette-woman, “the victim of power.”
1 April 1921, p. 312-313
Unsigned review of Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement. “This interesting and inspiring play bears the marks of having been written for the best of all reasons—the author had to write it! She obviously believes with passionate intensity that much unhappiness would be relieved by the facilitation of divorce.”
1 April 1921, 2.13, p. 313-314
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s book review, entitled “Back to the Pedestal?”, of Three Loving Ladies by Mrs. Dowdall, The Tribal God by Herbert Tremaine, and Into the Dark by Barbara Ring. On the “feminine note” in fiction. Hamilton writes that “there is an obvious and strong reaction against Woman, with a large W, at the moment; a real tendency to stop and ask whether she had not better really after all get back to the pedestal on which she could so easily be wrapped up and hidden away.” Hamilton is critical of these four novels and their representations of women and relationships.
8 April 1921, 2.14, p. 327-329
“Famous Sisters of Famous Men: I. Dorothy Wordsworth” by Theodora Roscoe. On Dorothy’s journals and poems; also her assistance to and guidance of William.
29 April 1921, 2.17, p. 402-403
“Personalities and Powers: Mrs. Meynell.” The article praises Alice Meynell and ranks her with Mrs. Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Miss Coleridge.
13 May 1921, 2.19, p. 456-457
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of Monday and Tuesday by Virginia Woolf. “To see tables and chairs, ordinary houses, glass ornaments on mantelpieces, people in trams, people at concerts, as strange, mysterious, fundamentally secret—that is alarming. And this is what Mrs. Woolf does and makes us do.”
3 June 1921, 2.22, p. 530-532
Rebecca West’s review of The New Morality by Harold Chapin. She praises Kate Cutler and Ellen Terry in the principal female roles, but notes that the plot is “thin.” West expresses little sympathy for Cutler’s character: “she is, without knowing it (for she knows nothing), an apostle of the new morality, which makes a wife demand from her husband not only technical fidelity but also abstinence from being ridiculous, or falling short in any way from being the finest man in the world.”
17 June 1921, p. 579-580
Rose Macaulay’s review, entitled “Three Kinds of Society,” of Where the Pavement Ends by John Russell, Intrusion by Beatrice Kean Seymour, and This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of Seymour, Macaulay writes: “She can draw live, natural young women, who see and partake of life, which includes but transcends love. They are suburban; some are cultured, high-minded, even attenders of poetry circles; they have all kinds of irritating qualities; but they are real and three dimensioned ... So many men in women’s books, and women in men’s no less, are only thus shown us, in their manward or womanward aspect, which is after all only one aspect, and that the least individual of those which our so complex human nature exhibits. But Mrs. Seymour’s women we see in the flesh.” Of Fitzgerald: “His women are like Mrs. Seymour’s men—you only see them in their manward aspect.”
24 June 1921, p. 600-601
“Famous Sisters of Famous Men, III: Eugénie de Guérin” by Theodora Roscoe. On the little-known French writer (poetry, letters, journals).
15 July 1921, 673-674
“Personalities and Powers”: Biographical spotlight on theatre manager Lilian Baylis.
22 July 1921, p. 699-700
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s reviews of Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare. Hamilton remarks on “the extraordinary temerity of the attempt to get into the mind not merely of a woman but of a woman separated from the rest of the world in which she lives by her pygmy size” and calls it a “representation of something that is, in essence, far bigger. For in this world we are all pygmies.” Complaining of de la Mare’s representation of one female character, Hamilton writes: “The explanation is partly, no doubt, that there are limits to the extent to which even genius can penetrate the secrets of the other sex.”
29 July 1921, p. 724-725
Rose Macaulay’s reviews of The Romance of His Life by Mary Cholmondeley. “Miss Cholmondeley is one of Nature’s novelists, though she has always been a little hampered by her taste for melodrama. Of how great value would be a full-length novel about her world as she sees it to-day!” Cholmondeley compared to Gaskell: “She might write a new ‘Cranford.’”
5 August 1921, p. 749-750
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of The Brimming Cup by Dorothy Canfield.
2 September 1921, p. 848
“Theatre & Concert-Room” notes the success of Clemence Dane’s play A Bill of Divorcement, which has travelled to the U.S.
7 October 1921, p. 959-960
Theatre column, “‘Woman to Woman’ and a Revival” by J. M. Harvey. Harvey comments that in Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement, “the action of the mother in seeking her own happiness and leaving her daughter to cope with the father is unnatural, but Miss Clemence Dane has treated her unlikely situation with such a sure sense of reality that it is easy to forgive the lapse from probability.”
2 December 1921, p. 1161-1163
Anne Doubleday's theatre column, “Will Shakespeare,” On Clemence Dane’s play. She describes Dane’s Shakespeare as womanly near the end of the column.
23 December 1921, p. 1231-1232
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday: “Clothes and the Woman.” Play by George Paston [pseudonym of Emily Morse Symonds]. Starts with a reflection on how few women’s plays are produced. “Because so few of the plays produced are written by women, the woman’s point of view in regard to a number of the domestic details of life strikes one as original when one meets it on the stage.”
1922
6 January 1922, p. 9-10
Book reviews by Mary Agnes Hamilton, including Humbug by E. M. Delafield and The Mother of All Living by Robert Keable. Hamilton foregrounds similarities between Delafield’s and Keable’s novels. Each book is about a young woman who, due to a lack of options, marries an older man, has a child, and feels unable to leave the marriage. Delafield’s is judged the better book. Keable’s “imagination is crudely, not furtively, sensual.” He is accused of being tasteless in his portrayal of sexuality.
6 January 1922, p. 10-11
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday: “The Truth About Blayds.” A. A. Milne’s play. As her father is on his deathbed, Isobel “speaks of how she has put aside the happiness that a husband and children would have brought her.” Doubleday finds the scene unconvincing and suspects that Milne is over-exaggerating spinsters’ sad moods. She adds that “Mr. Milne most kindly provides Isobel with a husband in the end after all.”
3 March 1922, p. 203-204
“The Fruit of the Tree,” in which Mary Agnes Hamilton reviews The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield. Hamilton calls Mansfield “cruel” and compares her to Guy de Maupassant, stating that “the world would be a madhouse if Miss Mansfield’s picture were a wholly true one; thank goodness, one’s strongest feeling is that it is not.”
10 March 1922, 230-231
Short article, “Bring Your Book!” by E. Nicholson. Proposes that women should get together to read silently. “All the freedom and independent comradeship of a club together with the sociable privacy of a friend’s house.” Then, at tea time, there would be discussion about the reading. Moving toward modern book clubs?
24 March 1922, p. 272-275
Rebecca West’s review of Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens. On the American suffrage movement, the necessity of militancy, and similarities between American and English feminisms.
7 April 1922, p. 329-330
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday,“The Decline of Mr. Arnold Bennett,” on The Love Match. Overall, Doubleday finds the play stale. She hypothesizes that Bennett characterizes his women with such faults as to assure himself that he is not the worst sort of person. She snidely remarks that he ought to go to work on the “Woman’s Page” of an evening paper, reporting on restaurants and flowers.
7 April 1922, p. 338
“In the Tideway.” Feminist literary criticism meets the “battle of the brows in this column which asserts that “the highbrows’ enthusiastic, if belated, discovery of the joys given to the world by Jane Austen, must cause amusement to those whose lowbrow grandmothers found these joys long ago, and passed them on to their daughters and their daughters’ daughters.”
14 April 1922, p. 351-352
“Personalities and Powers: Lady Wyndham, Miss Mary Moore.” Begins with a reflection on how few women hold positions of control and power in the theatre. Moore was both an actress and a partner of the Wyndham Theatre.
21 April 1922, p. 377-378
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday, “After Fourteen Years," on the Everyman Theatre and George Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married. “He wrote this play, if we may believe his preface, partly to show up our marriage laws and customs, partly to advocate easier divorce.” But Doubleday asserts that “he scarcely succeeds in showing up marriage.” Still, she asserts that it is a good play.
28 April 1922, p. 406
Poem, “Heart of a Seamstress” by Thomas Moult. Exposes harsh working conditions.
19 May 1922, p. 470-471
“Personalities and Powers: George Sand.” “She sympathised with and tried to help all whom she believed to be oppressed; and her pen was often wielded in what appeared to her the battle for liberty and justice.”
19 May 1922, p. 498-499
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of What Every Girl Should Know and The New Motherhood by Margaret Sanger. “If all writers on birth control possessed the intellect, the good sense, the sympathy and the courage of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, the cause she advocates ought to progress rapidly.”
2 June 1922, p. 521-522
E. M. Delafield’s review of Mr. Prohack by Arnold Bennett. Delafield laments Bennett’s heroine, stating that “according to formula, she is wily, simple, alluring, provocative, child-like, capricious, unreasonable, and utterly unscrupulous.”
2 June 1922, p. 524-525
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday on Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, starring Mrs. Patrick Campbell. “Suppose such a man. With Hedda’s brain, Hedda’s enormous share of personal magnetism, Hedda’s strength, he would go far.”
9 June 1922, p. 545-546
“Poetry and the Woman: The Creative Power” by E. MacBean, who asks “Has woman any really poetic talent? Can her work stand comparison with that of her confreres?” This is a response to Rebecca West’s writing on the subject in the May issue of Bookman. West writes that women cannot achieve “the listening attitude of mind which is the necessary prelude to the creative process." In response, MacBean states that “Women do write verse ... women do not, however, always excepting the “star” names, produce great or lasting poetry. And yet the creative talent is not lacking.” MacBean acknowledges women’s literary productions in popular fiction and cites statistics indicating that novels by women are more popular (better selling) than those produced by men. “It is not, then, imagination that woman lacks; it is not intellectuality; it is not vision. Is it not rather that she needs—Time.”
14 July 1922, p. 666-667
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday: “Miss Ethel M. Dell.” On the theatrical production of Dell’s The Way of an Eagle. “It is not very easy to understand why such intellectuals hate her so virulently.” Doubleday notes how often the heroine faints in the play, but fails to recognize that this characterization of the damsel in distress might be why some critics condemn Dell. Instead, Doubleday concludes, “And what a beautiful moral! The triumph of true love.”
21 July 1922, p. 691-692
Review of Rebecca West’s The Judge: “There have been very few writers who have been able to paint the portrait of an individual, especially when that individual belonged to the female sex.”
4 August 1922, p. 786-788
Clemence Dane’s review of the “new” Jane Austen book: Love and Friendship and Other Early Works by Jane Austen, published by Chatto and Windus. Dane offers a critique of Charlotte Brontë that anticipates Virginia Woolf’s later appraisal in A Room of One’s Own: “Charlotte Brontë was not primarily an artist: she was rather a woman with such an intense capacity for living and suffering that with her it was a case of ‘I must speak or die!’ But the pure artist writes, not because he must rid himself of his personal burden, but because he is a craftsman ... Such an artist, you feel, was Jane Austen.”
18 August 1922, p. 779
Brief article that reflects anxieties about which authors are read by the masses. Ethel M. Dell is referred to as an example of a popular author whom critics dismiss entirely.
1 September 1922, p. 835-836
Theatre column by Christopher St. John: “Another Bill of Divorcement.” On the screen adaptation of Clemence Dane’s play. St. John laments that the nature of film is to show, whereas the nature of theatre is to suggest and to “interest us in what is invisible.”
22 September 1922, p. 905-906
E. M. Delafield’s review of The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton. Wharton’s book is about a couple who marry “with the strange proviso that if either can, later on, ‘do better’ they shall be free to part.”
6 October 1922, p. 955
E. M. Delafield’s review of Variety by Sarah Grand. Delafield critiques Sarah Grand’s writing while still upholding the modernity of her subject matter.
27 October 1922, p. 1034-1035
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Mary Agnes Hamilton’s Follow My Leader which “tells the story of a woman’s conversion to Socialism.” Lynd finds the novel somewhat propagandist and concludes, “We hope that Mrs. Hamilton will not allow her excellent gift for fiction to waste itself in dreary political channels ... it would be lamentable for fiction to entrench itself in the muddy terrain of the newspapers.” This is a very interesting perspective considering that much of the short fiction that appears in T&T is entrenched in feminist politics.
3 November 1922, p. 1056-1057
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday, “The ‘Purple Pasts’ Theme," on Peter Garland’s Glamour. A play about adultery. Doubleday concludes that "by all means let a girl have a purple past if she wants to ... One would not suggest that a man should be biased either for or against marrying a girl because she has had a lover ... It is what a person is, not what they have done that matters.”
24 November 1922, p. 1136-1137
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf. Lynd notes Woolf’s eye for detail, and asserts that “nothing that she records is insignificant.”
1 December 1922, p. 1162-1163
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday: “Old Husbands for the New.” Review of The Laughing Lady by Alfred Sutro at the Globe Theatre. New and old moralities of relationships and divorce.
1 December 1922, p. 1170
Announcement of the death of Alice Meynell.
8 December 1922, p. 1184-1185
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Poor Man by Stella Benson. “She is as witty even as Miss Rose Macaulay, but fiercer, more self-conscious and less charitable. Her people are real people...”
22 December 1922, p. 1241-1242
Reviews of “Some New Plays by Sylvia Lynd. On John Galsworthy’s female characters, she pronounces that “not freedom but the discipline of work is what the modern woman needs. We are in danger of exchanging the gentlewoman for the female cad.”
1923
19 January 1923, p. 55-56
“Personalities and Powers: Clemence Dane.” The article notes that “there is a discreet blend of popular and literary appeal” in her books and plays. On her approach to sex: “In her books she insists more on the diversity between male and female than is quite acceptable to those who find a common denominator in humanity, and regard art as an earthy figure of the Kingdom of Heaven in which sex does not exist.” The article also notes that Dane is an active member of the Six Point Group.
26 January 1923, p. 83-84
“Personalities and Powers: Cicely Hamilton.” The unidentified author of the article notes that “I have heard people say: ‘Cicely Hamilton is not a sound feminist.’ If by that they mean that Cicely Hamilton has not a very high opinion of women in the mass, I agree ... But we have the highest authority for the belief that those whom we love we chasten.”
26 January 1923, p.98
“Correspondence.” A letter explaining that Clemence Dane’s Bill of Divorcement has been “hooted” in Italy. “The family feeling is strong in Italy, and there is no such thing as divorce legal or otherwise. (Perhaps this explains why the title of the play was translated “Solitudine”?)”
2 February 1923, p. 112-113
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Three Lovers by Frank Swinnerton. On Swinnerton: “He likes women to be chaste, beautiful and submissive. He likes men to be industrious and full of filial piety.” Lynd asserts that the novel “is to a great extent an attack on something that newspapers call the independence of modern girls.”
2 February 1923, p. 114-116
Theatre column by Christopher St. John. St. John reacts to Thomas Beecham’s theory that “music is at least a hundred years behind the theatre in development.” She argues, in contrast, that dramatists are “constitutionally unprogressive” and that “they cannot conceal their hostility to socialists, pacifists, feminists, or any other disagreeable persons who refuse to bow the knee to long venerated sentiments and institutions.” She notes that, in plays, women who transgress from conservative values are almost always punished and/or reformed by the end.
9 February 1923, p. 149-150
“Personalities and Powers: Rebecca West.” (Reprinted from July 16, 1920).
28 February 1923, p. 207-208
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday, “Lost—One Baby,” on If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson and B. Macdonald Hastings, which is an adaptation of the 1921 novel by Hutchinson. Doubleday is highly critical of the play, and thinks it uses suffering “as cheap stage properties.” The story deals with unwed pregnancy.
16 March 1923, p. 292-293
Algernon Blackwood’s review of Pauline by Baroness de Knoop. “It describes the adventures of a woman’s soul in the search for self-realization.”
16 March 1923, p. 294-295
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Watsons (A Fragment) by Jane Austen. Lynd asserts that the book “contains the least attractive set of people that Jane Austen ever drew. There is an element of angry bitterness in her treatment of them that suggests that her pen was an instrument of vengeance. Here she is less airy, less suave, less accomplished in the ladylike art of concealing emotion.”
16 March 1923, p. 297-298
Article on Selma Lagerlöf by Lydia Miller MacKay. Lagerlöf was the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature..
30 March 1923, p. 345-346
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Ladybird by D. H. Lawrence. Talks about “The Ladybird,” “The Fox,” and “The Captain’s Doll” as being connected through the “theme of woman’s submission to man.”
6 April 1923, p. 366-367
“Personalities and Powers: Sarah Bernhardt.” “No one writes magnificent parts for old women. Sarah, who was determined to go on acting until she died, turned to male parts as a solution of the problem.”
13 April 1923, p. 396-398
"Utopias." Sylvia Lynd’s book reviews of Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells More’s Utopia translated into Modern English by S. C. Richards. Lynd is critical of Thomas More’s utopia and highlights evidence of More’s sexism.
20 April 1923, p. 420-421
Book reviews by Mary Agnes Hamilton on Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby, Last Week by Nora D. Vines, Rough Hewmn by Dorothy Canfield. In “Anderby” and “Last” “we are presented with a husband, dominated by his wife, who is the ruling power in her local world.”
11 May 1923, p. 491-492
Sylvia's Lynd's review of In Defence of Women by H. L. Mencken. Although the review is entitled "In Defence of Mencken," Lynd is not really defending, but criticising Mencken. She appropriates his title to underscore the fact that he is not defending women in his book, but rather tearing them down.
1 June 1923, p. 563-565
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of Time is Whispering by Elizabeth Robbins. A romance story that Hamilton praises, although she does write that “I have a sort of sympathy with the complaint ... that women in novels, since the days when Charlotte Brontë drew Mr. Rochester, have a tendency to fall in love with curmudgeons, though I am not at all sure that they do not do just the same in actual life.”
22 June 1923, p. 635-636
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield. Lynd writes of “The Genius of Katherine Mansfield.”
6 July 1923, p. 684-685
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Romer Wilson’s The Grand Tour. The opening of the review is interesting in its positioning of women’s and men’s novels. “It has been left to a woman to reveal the mind of the modern man. Our young men who write novels confine their view of this earth’s surface to restaurants, haberdashers, and the less intelligent members of the opposite sex. Apparently the young men who are interested in civilisation, in art, in history, in the idiosyncrasies of the people about them, in the subtleties of all emotion, do not write novels. Now Miss Romer Wilson has written one for them.”
10 August 1923, p. 806-807
Theatre column by Cheviot Hill, who reviews The Young Person in Pink by Gertrude E. Jennings. Hill describes it as “a play about women by a woman who has obviously made a careful and sympathetic study of her characters” in which the women characters “outnumber the men by six to one.” Moreover, “the heroine departs from all tradition by being as astute as most people and more so than many” and she is placed in contrast to “the vacuous head of the conventional comedy heroine.”
14 September 1923, p. 925-926
Beatrice Harraden’s review of Thoughts on South Africa by Olive Schreiner. “We see Olive Schreiner torn between feelings of deep love of England and scathing indignation against her."
21 September 1923, p. 947-948
Book reviews by Mary Agnes Hamilton: A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton, The Pitiful Wife by Storm Jameson, Rosamund by Lord Gorell, and Midwinter by John Buchan. Hamilton is disappointed in A Son at the Front and contrasts it to The Age of Innocence and Glimpses of the Moon. Hamilton asserts that “Jameson has not a tenth of Mrs. Wharton’s insight nor a hundredth part of her skill.”
21 September 1923, p. 957-958
From the Correspondence. “A New Pronoun” by K. Browning, who notes that when the gender is unclear, using “he or she” is cumbersome, while using “he” is exclusionary. Suggests the development of a new pronoun for a genderless pronoun.
12 October 1923, p. 1026-1027
Unsigned review of The Lord Cometh! by Christabel Pankhurst. The reviewer focuses on Pankhurst’s central role in women’s suffrage. When the reviewer does finally turn to the book, s/he is blunt: “It is not well written.” Points to the curiousness of Pankhurst’s retreat from political activism.
12 October 1923, p. 1039
“In the Tideway." On the differences between an Australian monthly paper for women, “Woman’s World,” and English women’s papers. “Here [Australia] we still suffer from the man-controlled ‘woman’s’ paper, whose world is bounded by the four walls of the kitchen and dressing-room.”
2 November 1923, p. 1101-1103
Theatre column by Anne Doubleday. Review of The Green Goddess by William Archer. While Doubleday likes the play, she criticizes the melodramatic tropes of the sobbing heroine and the extremely devoted mother.
9 November 1923, p. 1124-1125
Book reviews by Sylvia Lynd: Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay, Antic Hey by Aldous Huxley, and Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence. Lynd compares Macaulay to Huxley and finds that Huxley’s classical education makes his works more difficult for the average reader to comprehend without consulting reference books. Interesting observation with regard to gender and the literary battle of the brows.
7 December 1923, p. 1219-1220
Book reviews by Sylvia Lynd, who discusses Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country as “particularly cheerful” because “one always likes to read about a woman who goes through life as a reaping and binding machine goes through a wheatfield. It is so restful not to have to feel sorry for a woman, and so unusual.”
7 December 1923, p. 1235-1236
“Olive Schreiner” by C. S. Cronwright-Schreiner, a biographical work with excerpts from O. Schreiner’s personal writings. The article is continued in the next several issues, though they focus primarily on her genealogy rather than her work.
7 December 1923, p. 1242
“A Reader’s Note Book” by “Callicles.” Review of Letters of Mrs. Montagu [Lady Mary Wortley Montagu] edited by Reginald Blunt. Montagu described as a “thoroughly modern woman.” Extract of Montagu’s criticism of girls’ education.
21 December 1923, p. 1285-1286
“Male ‘Feminism’ in an American Magazine” by Anne Martin. Response to the article “Women and Civilization” from the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly which argues that women have not produced art in equal numbers to men and are therefore inferior in imagination.
28 December 1923, p. 1303-1304
Book reviews by Mary Agnes Hamilton: Exits and Entrances by Eva Moore, The Spell of Siris by Muriel Hine, and The Passionate Year by James Hilton. Moore’s book is about her theatre career. Hamilton notes that “Moore managed, successfully, to combine a career with marriage.” On Sirius, Hamilton talks more about questions of whether women can balance careers and artistry with marriage and family.
1924
18 January 1924, p. 56-57
Sylvia Lynd outlines some of the main points of a written debate over “the sex novel” between Rebecca West and Sheila Kaye-Smith. West thinks sex should not be a central feature and views mass literature with skepticism, calling it “all pre-digested stuff” (56). Kaye-Smith’s perspective, however, is that love stories have an enduring and widespread appeal because of the primacy of the sex-instinct.
1 February 1924, p. 101-102
“Art and Internationalism” by Cicely Hamilton. Hamilton argues that art is something that breaks international boundaries in a way that politics and policy cannot: “art—whatever its origin—serves the needs of all nations impartially” (101).
8 February 1924, p. 135
“Imputed Virtue” by an unidentified author. On the search for a new kind of heroine, the author suggests: “Miss [May] Sinclair, Miss Rose Macaulay, Miss Ethel Sidgwick, have succeeded to my mind where men-writers have failed.” The article points to the double standard expressed by G. K. Chesterton: “The two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified, and a man who is.” Other authors discussed include W. M. Thackery and George Meredith. The article suggests that changes in the characterization of heroines began with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
15 February 1924, p. 150-151
“Personalities and Powers”: Anna Wickham. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman has written some clever feminist verse, but it is too intellectual, too sure. She is a better economist than artist. Anna Wickham senses, as an artist would, that the revolt of woman is not against her economic handicap alone, but against herself.” The article also calls attention to the disadvantage of the woman poet who has no wife to keep house for her, as the male poet often does.
22 February 1924, p. 177-178
Anne Doubleday’s review of Clemence Dane’s “The Way Things Happen.” Doubleday suggests that by anyone else, it would be a good play, but that it is “for her—a very poor play.” The main criticism appears to be that the play is too far removed from reality, with “the selfless heroisms, the lurid villainies, the stupendous sacrifice...and the various other impossibilities.”
28 March 1924, p. 296-297
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Edna Ferber’s So Big, which she calls “a remarkably sane, human and capable book, representative of what is best in modern American fiction.”
28 March 1924, p. 304
Short review of Vera Brittain’s Not Without Honour. “Miss Brittain follows the example of some present-day American writers in giving us analytical details of the daily lives and thoughts of her characters, however trivial, closely following their changing moods.”
4 April 1924, p. 326-328
“Personalities and Powers”: Feature on Turkish novelist and feminist Halide Edip Hanum [Adivar]. The article is primarily about her political work rather than her novels.
4 April 1924, p. 330-331
Thetare column by Anne Doubleday: “Saint Joan.” Doubleday calls it “the best thing that Mr. Shaw has ever written.” Praise for Sybil Thorndike’s portrayal of Joan.
4 April 1924, p. 335
Ad for So Big by Edna Ferber: “The novel of especial interest to all thinking women.” The ad goes on to call Ferber “one of the leading women writers on women. She writes, not of the creature of popular fiction, but of the post-war woman of to-day.”
2 May 1924, p. 424
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of Wandering Stars Wandering Stars by Clemence Dane. The form is a hybrid of novel and play. Of female character Damaris Payne, Hamilton writes: “she is a real woman, and she is—rare thing in modern fiction, not too common in any fiction—really in love. If she had given us nothing else, one must be grateful to Miss Dane for the truth and art with which, in this story, she has, quietly but firmly, put ‘passion’ in its place.”
9 May 1924, p. 448-449
Robert Lynd’s review of The Disinherited Family by Eleanor Rathbone. On the issue of the “living wage” and “family wage.”
16 May 1924, p. 473
Monica Ewer’s review of E. Crawshay-Williams’ play This Marriage. Ewer calls it “a bad play” and criticizes the way Williams generalises about marriage: “He believes that beneath the surface differences of every marriage, there are ‘laws of nature’ which make all marriages alike. Every marriage is ultimately based on man’s desire and woman’s maternal instinct.” Representation of man as “naturally polygamous. The wife in the play, after discovering her husband’s infidelity, not only forgives him, but conspires with his mistress to ensure that “things shall go on as before” since “Christ wants, Chris needs, both women.”
6 June 1924, p. 544
Book reviews by Sylvia Lynd. Column opens: “The siren is coming into her own again. She was always good company. It is soothing to read about women who make others suffer instead of suffering themselves.” She goes on to discuss the siren figure in J. Middleton Murry’s The Voyage and Maurice Baring’s C.
27 June 1924, p. 616-617
The Viscountess Rhondda’s article “Miss Robins’ Book” on Ancilla’s Share: An Indictment of Sex Antagonism, which was published anonymously. Rhondda begins: “It is now admitted that the author of this book is Miss Elizabeth Robins.”Robins’ argument is that civilization is in danger of extinction by war and that it is essential that women’s opinions be considered and that women and men co-operate. Rhondda calls it “the most notable thing of its kind that has appeared since Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour.”
4 July 1924, p. 640-641
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Home Maker by Dorothy Canfield. Of The Home Maker, Lynd writes: “The moral of this story is that woman’s place is not necessarily the home. To me it seems, however, that the Knapps are too unusual a couple for generalisations to be based upon them.”
29 August 1924, p. 847
“In the Tideway”: Brief news note that asserts: “It is a sad day when Mr. H. G. Wells is found wanting in courage. He puts an attack upon women in the mouth of ‘my friend,’ and then publishes it under his own name in the Westminster Gazette. It seems scarcely important enough for such elaboration.”
12 September 1924, p. 879
Notice on the removal of the Censor’s ban on George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
19 September 1924, p. 903-904
“Straws.” On “antagonists” to the women’s movement. This article deals in more depth with Time and Tide’s objections to H. G. Wells’ response to Elizabeth Robbins’ Ancilla’s Share. Wells blames American prohibition on the women’s suffrage movement. He has written of Robbins that she “thinks she is at war with men; she is really at war with her sex.” He further talks about women as desiring to become “a new sex of little, aggressive pseudo-men” and that “they will presently want a Lady God in a world in which the male will be a fading memory.l It will be a parallel and parodied world.”
3 October 1924, p. 954-955
“Personalities and Powers”: Biographical feature on E. Œ Somerville [Edith Somerville]
10 October 1924, p. 979-980
Sylvia Lynd’s reviews of Arnold Waterlow by May Sinclair and A Lost Lady by Willa Cather. Both reviews are mostly concerned with plot.
31 October 1924, p. 1051
Short article by Lady Rhondda on how she became a writer: “My Introduction to the Press: A Scrap of Autobiography.”
7 November 1924, p. 1080-1081
Sylvia Lynd’s reviews of The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy, Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson, Tents of Isreal by G. B. Stern, and Stella Defiant by Clare Sheridan. Lynd compares Benson and Kennedy in their attempts to represent “the masculine mind.”
7 November 1924, p. 1088-1089
Cicely Hamilton’s review of Memories of a Militant by Annie Kenney.
7 November 1924, p. 1090-1093
Thomas Moult’s poetry review. He spends some time discussing Emily Dickinson at the start, and also reviews May Sinclair’s “The Dark Night” at the end of the column.
21 November 1924, p. 1141-1142
Anne Doubleday’s review of The Human Factor by Cicely Hamilton. Doubleday asserts that Hamilton “is almost always at work telling us things we don’t want to know, hope we may never have to believe, or would like to forget about.”
28 November 1924, p. 1164-1165
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s reviews of Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay and The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby. She writes: “I have quite a definite belief in the future both of Miss Winifred Holtby and Miss Gertrude Spinney. In each case, I was struck by their first novels.”
5 December 1924, p. 1190
Review of Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s What I Remember signed “L. A.”. “To read this book...when one is fresh from an earlier reading of the autobiography of the militant, Annie Kenney, is to find the history of woman’s suffrage in England in two volumes.”
12 December 1924, p. 1222-1223
Anne Doubleday’s review of Noel Coward’s Vortex. She discusses the popular narrative arch of the frivolous wife and mother who is rehabilitated by the end of the play. But she contends that the problem with this story is often that the woman is characterized with “nothing regenerable.”
1925
9 January 1925, p. 84
Cicely Hamilton’s review of George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Philanderer. She discusses the female “types” depicted in the plays of Ibsen and Shaw, particularly the “womanly woman” or the “man’s woman” who, by virtue of her feminine power “can bawl like a fish-wife when things go wrong—she can out with her nails when she loses her temper—and yet can be petted and forgiven.”
16 January 1925, p. 54-55
“Personalities and Powers”: Beatrice Harraden. The article highlights her literary work and notes that she was the fortieth woman graduate of the B.A. Degree at the University of London. It also states that she is “a member of one of the earliest Societies for Women’s Suffrage.”
6 February 1925, p. 129-130
Anne Doubleday’s review of Camilla States Her Case by George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright]. The play is about an American actress who, during the war, marries an English soldier while expecting that he will likely die at the front. When he doesn’t die in the war, their married life becomes strained and Camilla eventually manipulates her husband into a divorce. Doubleday criticizes the characterization of the husband and argues that the play is too visibly biased in favour of the wife. She writes: “The difficulties which are cropping up in hundreds of marriages to-day are not the difficulties—comparatively simple ones—connected with freeing angels from brutes, they are difficulties which inevitably arise when two ordinary human beings have been brought up to hold incompatible points of view.”
20 February 1925, p. 179-180
“Types and Truth” by Charles H. Barker. Barker discusses the artificiality of gendered identities and suggests that “in the musty museums of our minds we set up two dummies, a Man and a Woman, and when we meet a character in a play or a novel we compare it with our dummy. If there is agreement we exclaim: ‘Oh, how true, how lifelike!” All that has happened is that the writer and reader have fixed up identical dummies.” He goes on to assert that “popular art and literature are hopelessly dominated by false types” but says that Shakespeare is great because he created “characters” rather than “types.”
6 March 1925, p. 224-225
Book review column by N. G. Royde-Smith, “Craftswomanship.” Deals with issues of women writers, but is rather off-putting in its assertion that “very few women are creative in the sense which distinguishes the masters of imagination in fiction.” She notes as exceptions Wuthering Heights, The Magnetic North, and Come and Find Me. Jane Austen is called “the perfect novelist.”
20 March 1925, p. 273-274
Anne Doubleday’s review of Anyhouse by F. Tennyson Jesse, which she titles “A Good Play Spoiled.” Doubleday takes issue with the plot twist when Maidie reveals that she had casual intercourse with an officer during the war. “It seemed to me most unlikely that an ordinarily brought-up and quite decent girl would have had casual intercourse with a man for whom she had no kind of feeling whatsoever. First intercourse is a big step, and it generally takes passion or marriage to lift an averagely self-controlled young woman over it.” Moreover, she finds it improbable that the young woman would announce the fact: “the instinct of self-preservation is stronger than that.” Though Jesse is likely privileging social commentary over narrative logic, Doubleday’s reaction reveals much about contemporary attitudes toward women’s sexuality.
27 March 1925, p. 294-295
“Personalities and Powers”: Susan Glaspell. Though the article mentions that Trifles is “a brilliant one act drama which did not receive quite the attention it deserved from the public,” this piece does not really contextualize any of Glaspell’s work as feminist, which is, perhaps, surprising.
3 April 1925, p. 329-330
Anne Doubleday’s review of A Man with a Heart by Alfred Sutro. Doubleday calls Sutro “old-fashioned” and accuses him of being behind with the times. She takes particular issue with his play’s apparent “belief that an unfaithful husband is a romantic object,” instead asserting that “to the average housewife an unfaithful husband is just about as romantic as a bad egg for breakfast.” She asks of the ending: “Did he [Sutro] expect anyone in the audience, over the age of eighteen, to believe that a man who had never resisted the temptations of the moment in the past was going to resist them in the future?”
10 April 1925, p. 354-355
Christopher St. John’s theatre column, “America Rushes In...” uses Dancing Mothers to discuss the American trend of dealing “flippantly” with “issues requiring the most serious and sincere treatment.” Basically, plays dealing with serious women’s issues are comedic, and St. John finds this unsettling.
17 April 1925, p. 376
N. G. Royde-Smith’s review of The Letters of Mary Russell Mitford edited by R. Brimley Johnson. Royde-Smith discusses the waning of religion during the late 1700s and early 1800s and suggests the effect that this had on Jane Austen and Mary Russell Mitford. Mitford’s correspondence is dubbed “racy,” though it is unclear why.
17 April 1925, p. 379
Cicely Hamilton’s review of The Verge by Susan Glaspell. Hamilton praises the character of Claire Archer as well as Sybil Thorndike’s performance in the role. Glaspell’s play explores the reasons for Claire’s madness. Hamilton analyzes how Claire’s thwarted physical desires play into her mental anguish.
24 April 1925, p. 400-401
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of William by E. H. Young. Interestingly, Hamilton is not aware of the gender of the author (though she says “I incline to think Miss). She has mostly praise for the novel.
1 May 1925, p. 424-425
Sylvia Lynd reviews Love by Elizabeth von Arnim. The story is about “a marriage between a charming widow of forty-seven and an impetuous young man of twenty-five.” Apart from the novels’ “sudden” tragic ending, Lynd is full of praise for it. Also reviewed is The George and the Crown by Sheila Kaye-Smith. Lynd also finds fault with this novel’s ending, though for opposite reasons: it is too happy, she says.
15 May 1925, p. 472
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Lynd isn’t a fan of the book’s free indirect discourse, especially when it veers the focus away from Clarissa. She calls Septimus “a huge piece of irrelevance” and remarks “I hate him for nearly spoiling delightful Mrs. Dalloway’s party.” Lynd praises the depiction of London and appears to like Clarissa as a character, but seems to focus all her attention on the delights of the party rather than the darker aspects of the book, which she dismisses as distractions from the main event.
5 June 1925, p. 544-545
Mary Agnes Hamilton, in her review of The Unhurrying Chase by H. M. Prescott [Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott] assumes erroneously throughout that the author is male. In previous reviews where she did not know the sex of the author, she noted this in her self-conscious pronoun usage (see her treatment of E. H. Young on 24 April 1925, for example). Here, however, she seems absolutely assured that the author is male, even though this is false. It is interesting to speculate why this might be. Perhaps because the book, an historical novel about twelfth century France, strikes her as “intellectual” and “giv[ing] the mind something to work on” she assumes a male author.
12 June 1925, p. 568-569
Sylvia Lynd’s review of The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton. The novel features a woman who ran away from her husband and baby daughter and who later re-establishes contact with her daughter, only to find herself in a rivalry with her daughter over a former lover. Lynd notes that “rivalry between mother and daughter, though happily not often so distressingly acute as this, is common enough.”
3 July 1925, p. 640-641
Mary Agnes Hamilton, in her reviews, asserts that Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys has “much political wisdom in it.”
17 July 1925, p. 691
News note on the debate between Lord Ampthill and Rose Macaulay playing out in the Morning Post. References to Macaulay’s development of a “really fine definition of that much abused word feminism.”
28 August 1925, p. 840
Thomas Moult’s review of Faithful Jenny Dove and Other Tales by Eleanor Farjeon. Moult is full of praise for Farjeon’s talents and finds it particularly interesting that she has, in the title story, crafted a ghost who is “all gladness and zest.”
30 October 1925, 1060-1062
Edmund Candler’s review of The Little World by Stella Benson. He notes that she can be “whimsical and impressive, and even reverent, at the same time...And nobody could be more modern.” Candler is interested in the evolution of romance. “Romance is not dead. Far from it. We let her into the house still, but as a pet, on sufferance, something to play with and poke fun at, though in reality we are just as much in love with her as we were when we were young.”
13 November 1925, 1116
N. G. Royde-Smith reviews The Mulberry Bush and Other Stories by Sylvia Lynd and A Casual Commentary by Rose Macaulay. The review is mostly about the dilemma of reviewing books written by one’s friends.
27 November 1925, p. 1164-1165
N. G. Royde-Smith reviews Cloud Cuckoo Land by Naomi Mitchison, Black Harvest by I. A. R. Wylie, and Bread of Deceit by Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes. Mitchison’s historical accuracy is praised, but it is suggested that the average reader might not pick this book up unless s/he had found Mitchison’s previous historical novels enjoyable. On Lowndes’ novel, Smith takes pains to assert that “if anyone, coming fresh to Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes, in this novel, should class it as a story for girls on account of the white muslin and blue silk cornflowers on which the author lays such apparently artless stress he, or she, is advised to read on for a few chapters” and that the reader will find a perfectly gruesome tale.
27 November 1925, p. 1165-1166
Sylvia Lynd reviews The Big House of Inver by E. Œ Somerville [Edith Somerville] and Martin Ross, and The Professor’s House by Willa Cather. Noting the significance of the titles, Lynd begins: “It is a well-known superstition that when the word ‘House’ appears in the title of a novel, that novel is not what dear old ladies in consultation with their Mudie list, call a nice book...The House of Mirth, The House with the Green Shutters, The Fall of the House of Usher—one can quickly produce examples.”
27 November 1925, p. 1166-1167
Anne Doubleday’s theatre column includes a lengthy overview of Cicely Hamilton’s The Old Adam. Doubleday gestures to the praise the play has received, and yet she suggests that “Deep down in almost every one of us lies the conviction that there are subjects unsuitable for a woman’s consideration, subjects on which, if she does venture to advance an opinion, she should not be taken too seriously; and one of these is war.”
1926
8 January 1926, p. 84
Agnes Mure Mackenzie’s review of Cicely Hamilton’s Christmas play, The Child in Flanders.
15 January 1926, p. 59-60
Christopher St. John’s review of Susan Glaspell’s play Inheritors. St. John says that in the play “a woman is shown in other aspects than in the one from which dramatists for centuries have invited us to regard her.”
26 February 1926, p. 201-202
Article by Clemence Dane on the Old Vic: “The Old Vic is undeniably the history of how generation after generation of men ruined a theatre till a woman came along to lift it out of the mud and make it into the nearest approach to a National Theatre that we possess.” She refers to the account of the theatre by Cicely Hamilton and Lilian Baylis.
19 March 1926, p. 269
“The Dethronement of Cupid”: Article by Cicely Hamilton on the paperback romance’s decreasing popularity. Hamilton speculates correlations with the rise of sentimental cinema, and with the younger generations’ disenchantment with traditional romance.
19 March 1926, p. 271-272
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. The story is about a woman who becomes a witch. “For nearly fifty years she was a woman as other women are: an affectionate daughter, a not unaffectionate sister, a meek sister-in-law, a popular maiden aunt. And then, suddenly, she determined not to be any of these things, but a woman who would live alone, unquestioned, and sleep, if she found such a proceeding convenient, without fear, in a ditch.” Lynd calls the novel “one of those rare books that are not only works of genius, but also works of art.”
2 April 1926, p. 332
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Not Sufficient Evidence, by Mrs. Victor Rickard [Jessie Louisa Rickard], a novel about a woman who killed her tyrannical husband. “She has given us a woman whom we are convinced is a criminal, but who is at the same time a human and almost likeable character.”
30 April 1926, p. 427-428
Sylvia Lynd’s book reviews include a short, but positive, note on Alice Meynell’s Essays of To-Day and Yesterday.
14 May 1926 [special issue], p. 18-19
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s review of Fanny Hurst’s Appassionata. After confessing to admire Hurst, Hamilton critiques her style, saying that her writing “mannerisms have, definitely, got on my nerves.”
18 June 1926, p. 548
Sylvia Lynd’s lukewarm review of Edith Wharton’s Here and Beyond.
2 July 1926, p. 598-599
Christopher St. John’s review of Clemence Dane’s play, Granite. St. John is “all at sea” about the play, questioning its logic and structure. The story is of “a woman who made a Faust-like bargain,” but St. John says that “the subjugation of Judith Morris by the ‘nameless man’ is harder to understand than the subjugation of Faust by the Ancient Enemy of mankind.”
3 September 1926, p. 795-796
Thomas Moult’s review of “New Poetry” includes Naomi Mitchison’s The Laburnum Branch, which he calls “a revelation of a woman brimming over with life and faith.”
10 September 1926, p. 815-816
Sylvia Lynd’s review of May Sinclair’s Far End, “an account of a marriage; a husband’s infidelities, and a wife’s successful tenacity.” Lynd argues that the novel is “built upon an unsound basis. The notion that mind and body are separate compartments and that an irresistible physical passion need not absorb the mind seems to be quite untenable.”
17 September 1926, p. 835-836
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s book reviews include Painted Fires by Nellie McClung and The Viking Heart by Laura Salverson. These are compared to one another in that they are each “the story of a Northern [female] Immigrant to Canada.”
24 September 1926, p. 855-856
Christopher St. John’s review of the theatrical adaptation of Margaret Kennedy’s novel, The Constant Nymph. St. John asserts that the story was not adequately adapted from novel form to a theatrical production.
15 October 1926, p. 927
Winifred Holtby’s review of From Man to Man by Olive Schreiner, which is about prostitution and marriage, and The South Africans by Sarah Gertrude Millin. Holtby notes how sex-based and race-based oppressions are parallel and related struggles when discussing Millin’s book.
22 October 1926, p. 954-955
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Introduction to Sally, by “the Author of ‘Elizabeth and Her German Garden’” [Elizabeth von Arnim].
29 October 1926, p. 983-984
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train. Crewe Train is about a woman “getting engaged and married and having a baby” who “however, wanted to live the life of a small boy.”
12 November 1926, p. 1028-1029
“Personalities and Powers: Stella Benson.” Includes a few remarks on her “militant” brand of feminism.
19 November 1926, p. 1054
1055-6: N. G. Royde-Smith’s review of Hilda Vaughan’s Here are Lovers. Rodye-Smith compares Vaughan to George Eliot, specifically connecting her novel to Adam Bede.
3 December 1926, p. 1100-1101
“Personalities and Powers”: Margaret Kennedy. “It is impossible not to suspect Miss Kennedy of a profound sympathy with those of her characters who do not conform to the conventional values of society.”
3 December 1926, p.1104
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Stella Benson’s Goodbye Stranger. Lynd opens with an assertion that “women after all are the important larger section of novel-readers.” She remarks that she tends to think of two types of novel readers, those who like Stella Benson and those who don’t.
1927
14 January 1927, p. 37
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield. “Mrs. Canfield so animates this narrow world with life, that a washing of baby linen becomes as important as a Napoleonic victory. And not only that, the really important things that hide behind the domestic trivialities, gradually appear and loom formidably, also.”
28 January 1927, p. 81-83
“Personalities and Powers”: Bernard Shaw. The article focuses on his alignment with political movements, including suffrage. “The general attitude towards Mr. Shaw twenty-five years ago was one of the greatest disapproval and gravest suspicion. People felt that the foundations of morality were rocking, and they were positively certain that Mr. Shaw was rocking them.”
4 February 1927, p. 114-115
“A Feminist Play in Paris”: Anne Doubleday’s review of Maitre Bolbec et son Mari by M. M. Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil. While noting that the play has been met with disfavour by feminists in Paris, Doubleday asserts that she sees nothing wrong with the representation of feminism in the play. The play is about a career woman whose dissatisfied husband takes a mistress. To win back her husband, the woman must give up her career. She then turns to spending money on clothes and carrying on with her secretary. The husband then offers a compromise that his wife can return to her profession and he will be the secretary.
11 February 1927, p. 136
“Women and War”: Hilda Matheson’s review of The Story of Louise de Bettignies by Antoine Redier. Matheson recommends the book, though she says it is not well written nor well translated, as an important and “interesting chapter in the history of women’s active war work.”
11 February 1927, p. 138
Christopher St. John’s review of Susan Glaspell’s Bernice
25 February 1927, p. 180
“The New Profession”: Christopher St. John’s review of The Gold Diggers by Avery Hopwood. Though she calls the gold digger dishonourable, St. John goes on to say: “It must be admitted that few of the many trades and professions which have been thrown open to women during the last fifty years are well enough paid to attract those who want the best of everything.” She notes that the first act of the play encourages thought on the subjects of women and economics.
25 February 1927, p. 186-187
Olive Heseltine’s review of Entertainment by E. M. Delafield. “Perhaps the cleverest [story] is the first in which the conversation of two business men who are taking out a couple of chorus girls to lunch at an expensive restaurant, reveals that complete mental estrangement of the sexes which sophisticated civilisation so carefully endeavours to conceal.”
18 March 1927, p. 260-262
“Personalities and Powers”: Mrs. H. M. Swanwick [Helena Lucy Maria Swanwick], feminist writer and activist.
18 March 1927, p. 264-265
Dame Louisa Innes Lumsden’s review of Emily Davies and Girton College by Lady Stephen.
18 March 1927, p. 266
Anne Doubleday’s review of Shakespeare’s Othello at the Old Vic discusses the problems of performing the role of Desdmona. Doubleday asserts that, despite the tradition of casting established actresses in the role, a younger actress is needed for the part because “no intelligent, fully grown woman could have behaved as Desdemona behaved from the time Othello began to suspect her.” Of Miss Gwynne Whitby’s performance, Doubleday says: “She does not play the part as if she were a door-mat woman—but as it should be played, as a child whose will-power is still weaker than that of the far older Othello, whose experience holds no hint which can tell what is the passion surging round her, who does not recognize jealousy because she has never seen it, to whom Othello is the hero-god that an older man can be to a child.”
15 April 1927, p. 360-361
Anne Doubleday’s review of Elizabeth Baker’s play, Bert’s Girl. Doubleday says the play has “a certain freshness which commends it to the jaded playgoer” because the happy ending involves the heroine avoiding marriage rather than getting married. Doubleday does, however, take issue with the play’s suggestion of another possible romance for the heroine rather than letting her be single.
6 May 1927, p. 427-428
Naomi Royde-Smith’s review of The Allinghams by May Sinclair. The review is not particularly positive.
13 May 1927, p. 451-452
Vera Brittain’s review of The Lovely Ship by Storm Jameson. Brittain asserts that “Miss Storm Jameson will never persuade us that she has dealt honestly with her familiar theme of marriage plus career until she succeeds in giving us a normal heroine with a normal sex history.”
3 June 1927, p. 520-521
“The Truth About Aunts” by Winifred Holtby. Holtby discusses the representations of aunts in mythology, literature, and popular culture as “proper subjects for ridicule and contempt.”
3 June 1927, p. 522-523
Review of Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft by William Godwin, signed W. H. “Few answers to the contention that ‘clever’ women and ardent feminists make unsatisfactory wives, can be more decisive than their biographies written by their husbands.”
3 June 1927, p. 523-524
Naomi Royde-Smith’s review of Mr. Fortune’s Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner. “The author of ‘Lolly Willows’ is, as yet, growing far too quickly into a great writer’s estate to be concerned with the commercial advantages of retelling a successful tale.”
10 June 1927, p. 552
Anne Doubleday’s review of Anne—One Hundred by Sewell Collins, a play about a young woman who inherits her father’s factory.
17 June 1927, p. 573-574
Olive Heseltine’s fiction reviews include To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Knock Four Times by Margaret Irwin, The Wall of Glass by Amabel Williams Ellis, and The Old Countess by Anne Douglas Sedgwick. Heseltine asserts that Woolf’s “genius is beyond dispute.”
8 July 1927, p. 644-645
Mary Agnes Hamilton’s reviews of Mariners by Clemence Dane and Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton. Hamilton begins with the assertion that she is inclined to think that “a larger proportion of the work of women writers is really about something, and about something interesting, than is the case with the contemporary work of men.” Of women writers, she argues: “For one reason or another, the sense of life as a whole appears to be more vividly present to them.”
19 August 1927, p. 756-757
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Journal of Katherine Mansfield edited by J. Middleton Murry. Lynd asserts: “It is a story of success as an artist, success as a woman (without which a woman’s success in art seems but half a success, so exacting are men and women alike in regard to women) and of success as a brave and magnanimous human being.”
26 August 1927, p. 773-774
Olive Heseltine’s review of The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen. “Since The Hotel consistently fails to sink to the level of mediocrity demanded by the general reading public, it is probably that it may not obtain the immediate recognition its rare quality deserves.”
16 September 1927, p. 821-822
Olive Heseltine’s review of The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby. “The power of the novel lies in its author’s ability to treat depressing themes with buoyancy, to rend the heard with the lightest of touches, and to keep romance firmly rooted in reality.”
30 September 1927, p. 858-859
“Mr. Wells [H. G. Wells] on Men and Women, 1912-1927” by “Candida.” “Meanwhile should give us the measure of how far, on this complicated man-and-woman question which lies tangled at the root of most of our other difficulties, Mr. Wells has advanced since he wrote Marriage.”
7 October 1927, p. 878-879
“Mr. Wells [H. G. Wells] on Men and Women, 1912-1927, Part II” by Candida. “Mr. Wells is first and foremost a thinker. Yet in a world in which the man-and-woman question is painfully alive; at a time when half the capitals of Europe are puzzling and debating about it, Mr. Wells placidly shuts his eyes...he can still think of no better remedy than he thought of fifteen years ago—a more complete subjection.”
7 October 1927, p. 884
Olive Heseltine’s review of The Things that Are by E. M. Delafield. Heseltine compares Delafield to Jane Austen. The novel is about an anxious, unhappy housewife. “Miss Delafield has never written more brilliantly, more truthfully, or with more telling effect.”
2 December 1927, p. 1088
Review of Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens, signed “M. W.”
23 December 1927, p. 1158-1159
“Horrid Females”: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s review of Representative Women edited by Francis Birrell. It is a series of biographies of women including Aphra Behn, Sarah Churchill, and Elizabeth Chudleigh.
1928
10 February 1928, p. 133
“Correspondence”: A letter by Lillias Mitchell objects to the representation of adultery in E. M. Delafield’s short story, “Decision,” published Jan. 27. Mitchell suggests that it is the writer’s duty to uphold morals and values.
17 February 1928, p. 157
“Correspondence”: E. M. Delafield responds to Lillias Mitchell’s letter regarding the representation of adultery in “Decision.” She defends the story, but agrees with Mitchell about the ideal of maintaining “a true standard of values.”
2 March 1928, p. 204
“Correspondence”: Another reader weighs in on the question of morality and the representation of adultery in E. M. Delafield’s “Decision.” Blanche L. Leigh writes: “This [story] is a kind of food, a mental exercise, and I hope Time and Tide will never resort to the improvement of other people’s morals after the manner of the old-fashioned tract.”
2 March 1928, p. 204-205
Anne Doubleday’s review of Young Woodley by John Van Druten. Interestingly, this review of a play about adultery follows on the heels of the controversy over E. M. Delafield’s short story, “Decision,” published a few weeks earlier. Doubleday finds the representation of Laura Simmons unbelievable, since “the people who can do things of that kind [adultery] are those in whom the sex instinct is so overmastering and overwhelming a thing that it has become a pathological, an abnormal growth, so that everything else—honour, decency, love—is submerged by it.”
16 March 1928, p. 242
“Henrik Ibsen” by Elizabeth Robins. Robins asserts that Ibsen should be celebrated for being “an instrument used by the Zeitgeist to enfranchise the spirit of women.”
30 March 1928, p. 318
“Ibsen at the Dangerous Age” by Christopher St. John. St. John considers whether plays like A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler have become “dated.” She asserts that they have not, but says “it implies that after all we have not got much further than Ibsen, although he was born a hundred years ago. The truth, unpalatable to arrogant moderns, is that we have not yet caught him up.”
6 April 1928, p. 332-333
“A Few Remarks on Sitwellism” by Edith Sitwell. In this follow-up to last week’s article on modern poetry, Sitwell discusses her own work.
6 April 1928, p. 335-336
Vera Brittain’s review of Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay. “Miss Macaulay is one of the most terrifying of women. Beneath the limpid stream of her frolic, the bubbling froth of her irony, she is all the time asking us direct, dreadful questions...[such as]... Why, in articles on the Modern Girl, the Business Woman, the Mother and her (always male) Baby, does the Human Press appear to regard women, not as the very varied individuals that they are, but as standardised products...?”
11 May 1928, p. 454-456
“The Changing Theatre, II” by St. John Ervine. This article presents an incredibly essentialist argument about how women have “emasculated” the theatre. Ervine asserts that one of the most prominent changes in theatre has been the increased participation of women both on stage and in the audience. He goes on to say “I do not know what conclusion may be drawn from the fact that, simultaneously with the appearance of women on the English stage, the English drama became licentious.” He refers to the “coarseness” of Aphra Behn’s plays. He further argues that “women dislike the sombre side of life” and thus prefer comedies. “The main result of the great invasion of the theatre by women and the withdrawal from it of men has, therefore, been to make comedy preferred to tragedy, to promote sentimentality, to falsify fact by an excessive insistence on the pleasanter details of life and, in some respects, to emasculate the play by making it a weak thing, incapable of healthy contact with the major facts of existence.”
18 May 1928, p. 489-490
Anne Doubleday’s review of Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell. She notes: “It is only lately that we have begun to deal frankly and faithfully with relations between mother and daughter” and calls Glaspell’s analysis “masterly.”
1 June 1928, p. 532-533
“Mr. Shaw’s Socialism for Ladies” by St. John Ervine. “The first hundred-and-fifty pages of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism appear to have been written on the assumption that her intelligence is nothing to boast about. Everything, including the obvious, is explained.”
22 June 1928, p. 607-608
Sylvia Lynd’s review of Black Sparta by Naomi Mitchison. Lynd expresses great hostility toward the subject of homosexuality: “Mrs. Mitchison deals conscientiously here with the element of perversion in Greek civilisation and, like a true historical novelist, assumes the attitude and mind of the time of which she writes. These boys of hers in love with other boys, are not like boys at all however; but like emotional girls, and instead of finding them vicious, we find them insipid.”
10 August 1928, p. 765
Vera Brittain’s review of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. Brittain describes the book as “a plea, passionate, yet admirably restrained and never offensive, for the extension of social toleration, compassion and recognition to the biologically abnormal woman, who, because she possesses the tastes and instincts of a man, is too often undeservedly treated as a moral pariah.” Brittain briefly discusses differences between the sexes and representations of traditional or “normal” femininity and masculinity.
21 September 1928, p. 876
Vera Brittain’s review of The Children by Edith Wharton. “What, demands her theme, is to happen to the children in a society where casual divorce is less the exception than the rule, where unions are entered into so lightly that the first difference or discomfort is considered a sufficient reason for dissolving them, and where with each new marriage the existing sons and daughters become mere unpleasant reminders of the old?”
12 October 1928, p. 943
Clara Smith’s review of Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Interestingly, Smith pays much more attention to the historical aspects of the novel than to its treatment of sex/gender.
14 December 1928, p. 1229-1230
“A Commentary on Books and Things” by Rebecca West. West reviews the published Diary of Countess Tolstoy, wife of the novelist. She discusses the diary’s exposé of Tolstoy’s marital life, focussing on his contempt for his wife and the sexual torment he caused her. West then reads Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which examines questions of crime and how to stop it,through the lens of the Countess’ diary and the cruelties contained therein.
1929
1 February 1929, p. 117-118
“Mrs. Dangle” reviews The Lady with a Lamp by Reginald Berkeley. The review focuses on how Florence Nightingale has been represented in various forms, asserting:“It must seem almost incredible to very young people that her great achievements were actually used as arguments against woman [sic] suffrage on the grounds that they had been accomplished by a sweet womanly woman who had no vote at all.”
1 March 1929, p. 234
Vera Brittain’s review of Undine by Olive Schreiner. Comparing the novel to The Story of an African Farm, Brittain asserts: “We find the same precocious and stringent observations on the position of woman.”
8 March 1929, p. 264-266
“Recent Poetry” by Naomi Royde-Smith includes Poems: and the Spring of Joy by Mary Webb, Trivial Brake by Elinor Wylie, The Buck in the Snow by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Gold Coast Customs by Edith Sitwell.
8 March 1929, p. 266
Clara Smith’s reviews: Expiation by “the Author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’” [Elizabeth von Arnim], The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Enter Sir John by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson. Smith focuses on the theme of love and its consequences in each text.
15 March 1929, p. 806
“Mrs. Dangle” reviews Major Barbara starring Sybil Thorndike. She notes that Thorndike’s interpretation of the character is somewhat different from the character Shaw has written.
26 April 1929, p. 493-494
Clara Smith’s review of Women Are Like That by E. M. Delafield. “Women (some women) are like this, and though these are not in any way grotesque representations of humanity, her stories provide such pointed, clever studies of character and such witty, mocking criticism of our foolish ways, that their general moral effect is that of a first-class show of caricatures.”
10 May 1929, p. 560
“Mrs. Dangle” reviews Mariners by Clemence Dane, focusing on its theme “that there is more in marriage than the usual platitudes allow, or than can ever be clearly understood or measured by the outsider.”
21 June 1929, p. 755-756
Edith Sitwell’s review of The Farmer’s Bride and The Rambling Sailor, poetry by Charlotte Mew. Sitwell makes a comment near the end of the review on the associations of women writers with romance: “She [Mew] died, and her work is still unrecognised, whilst sloppy nonsense about insincere and vulgar ‘love’ affairs makes a cheap notoriety for other and cheaper women verse-writers.”
2 August 1929, p. 989
E. B. C. Jones’s review of Joining Charles by Elizabeth Bowen. Jones speaks critically of “the too-self-consciously elusive school” of writers to which Bowen belongs, which we might now take to mean the high modernists. “She requires too much of her reader.”
16 August 1929, p. 980-982
“The Work of Charlotte Yonge” by E. M. Delafield. Delafield discusses Yonge’s divergences from her contemporaries. “Before Miss Yonge began to publish, children’s books were terribly moral.” She continues, “When one remembers the extreme blackness and whiteness of the heroes and villains in the fiction of Miss Yonge’s contemporaries, Philip [of The Heir of Redclyffe] comes as a surprise.”
27 September 1929, p. 1148-1149
Naomi Royde-Smith’s review of Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy by Rebecca West. A woman in love becomes clairvoyant and “can see into the mind of her lover.” Smith notes that West’s work has not received the same acclaim as some of her contemporaries, both literary and popular.
11 October 1929, p. 1212-1213
“As it was in the Beginning” by W. H. [possibly Winifred Holtby]. Review of The Female Spectator edited by Mary Priestley. The article connects the contemporary Woman’s Magazine periodical to Eliza Heywood’s eighteenth-century publication, noting that many of the contemporary stances and interests of women are the same as those of their 1744-6 counterparts.
1 November 1929, p. 1814-1815
Clara Smith’s review of Passing by Nella Larsen. “This is not a deep study of the Negro problem, but it does give an extremely interesting account of a point of view and of a middle-class section of Harlem, which must be new to most English readers.”
15 November 1929, p. 1871-1872
Theodora Bosanquet’s review of A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Bosanquet describes the method of Woolf’s argument as “the subtle introduction into the minds of other people of an innocent kitten of a fantastic idea, which makes itself at home in the most engaging and disarming manner before it shows the teeth and claws of the fierce tiger of truth that it really is.”
22 November 1929, p. 1403-1404
“An Excerpt from ‘A Room of One’s Own’” by Virginia Woolf.
29 November 1929, p. 1434-1436
“Excerpt from ‘A Room of One’s Own’” by Virginia Woolf.
6 December 1929, p. 1474
The first installment in the “Diary of a Provincial Lady” series, by E. M. Delafield.