The Woman Of It

WOMEN AGAINST MEN--Storm Jameson --Knopf ($2.50).

It would be revealing, if hardly fair, to report that one of Authoress Jameson's favorite words is "sour." But so many successful authors deal in soft soap that it is scarcely surprising if less acclaimed but equally competent competitors take to acid. The three long short stories in Women Against Men are potent comments on a moot question: Is a hard world harder for women than for men? P:Narrator of the first story' is Fanny, a shy, embittered woman whose career (she is a writer) is overshadowed by the much flashier success of an old girlhood friend, Victoria., who uses herself as material for love-affairs, her affairs as material for her best-selling books. Victoria is gross, cynical, shrewd; somehow her daughter turns out to be the opposite. She soon sees through her mother, takes her affection to Fanny. When the daughter marries a nice young man, Victoria's Bohemian creed is horrified and she tries to break it up. But youth wins out. Aging Victoria shrugs her shoulders, says: "It seems you are all I have left, Fanny." P:Because Emily was a rich man's daughter, she might look kindly on young Clerk Evan but she had to marry in hw own class. She took Evan as her lover, however, later on, and did her considerable best to help him up in the world. When her husband died she made her child legitimate by marrying the father. Evan was an able fellow, with women as well as with men. Emily discovered his infidelity but forgave him again & again. Though coming to know him was not much different from having her heart break she was able to comfort him when he felt remorseful, reassure him that his stabs were only pinpricks.

P:A day in the life of an aging harlot is not likely to be much like a faun's afternoon. In A Day Off the blowzy heroine, just ditched by her last furtive provincial protector, blows in all her remaining shillings on a junket to Richmond Park, to have a nap on the grass. In the ladies' room she has luck enough to steal a purse, and when she gets home she finds a farewell present from George under her door. But she knows the jig is almost up. Authoress Jameson puts her to bed, watches her doze off. "The pulse in her arm lying on the dirty sheet is one of the stages of a mystery. Look once more and you can see how beautiful she is. Poor woman, let her sleep."

The Author, With her fourth novel (The Pitiful Wife, 1923), Margaret Storm Jameson (Mrs. Guy Chapman) made critics stop, look, listen. Her formula, a combination of hard masculine realism with feminine deftness and sympathy, pleased many a post-War reader cloyed with hard-boiled sentimentality. Onetime dramatic critic, publisher, copywriter, editor, she has done a good deal for her 36 years in a man's world. Brought up among ships in Yorkshire's Whitby (her grandfather, George Galilee, was a shipowner) she longed to build them, had to content herself with listening to tall seafaring tales. After graduating from Leeds University, she worked in the British Museum on her Master's thesis, Modern

Drama in Europe, an able, authoritative, book. Women Against Men is her 14th book. Others: The Lovely Ship, The Voyage Home, A Richer Dust.

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