Sea Gypsy Legend

THE MOON IS FEMININE -- Clemence Dane--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Tall, dark Clemence Dane (real name: Winifred Ashton) has not only written best-selling novels (Broome Stages, The Babyons), successful plays (Bill of Divorcement, Will Shakespeare), detective stories and movie scenarios, but at the same time she has pleased the critics. Her critical reputation is largely due to the actress-like ease (she is an exactress) with which she imitates other writers.

Thus, the story of Henry Cope. 1803 hero of The Moon Is Feminine, a rich, dilettante bachelor with "quick" green eyes, narrow forehead, "Wertherish smile," is too brightly in the manner of Virginia Woolf to be missed by the dimmest-sighted reader. But Clemence Dane has her own transformer for cutting down Virginia Woolf's voltage to serve more popular tastes: the mood of her legend comes nearer to those melancholy romances which flourished in the 90s--dark young women floating beautifully dead in lily ponds.

Henry Cope grudgingly falls in love with Lady Molly, a statuesque but unaffected blonde who is completely captivated by his secret half-belief in an old family legend that he is descended from the Green People, a species of sea gypsies who live in an underground world called St. Martin's Land. A few days later he meets a tousled, green-eyed boy who gives him an ancient amber cup, tells queer tales, disappears in the sea. As other meetings between them follow, Molly keeps sympathetic pace with Henry's lyric excitement, approves his redecorating his house as a green cave, controls her jealousy of his amphibian kinsman. By this time the reader has guessed that Author Dane is not writing a simple triangle fantasy: Henry and Molly symbolize the struggle between the Poet and Domesticity.

The climax is a warning to poets' wives. On the night Molly is sure Henry intends to leave with the sea gypsy, she determines on a desperate last defense: a diversion of the sea gypsy's attention to herself. The sea gypsy accepts, and the next morning her body is found in the wake of the storm to which she surrendered.

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