Pre-War Tale

SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL--Willa Cather--Knoft ($2.50).

This week appeared Willa Cather's first novel in five years. It is an immaculately written account of a few months in the life of a family in Virginia. The year is 1856. The family is that of sober, plebeian Henry Colbert and his subtle, suffering, tony wife, Sapphira. They live, well-supplied with slaves, a little beyond the edge of civilization, within the fringes of the mountains. Sapphira's widowed daughter, an abolitionist at heart, does good among the mountaineers and the slaves. Sapphira's husband, another, spends most of his time at the mill, earnestly reads Bunyan's Holy War. Sapphira herself manages the household from her wheel chair (she has dropsy), yearns for the good life in Winchester. Mainly the story is of her more & more elaborate persecution of the young mulatto Nancy, whom she wrongly suspects of bedding with her husband. At her lowest she invites her rakehell nephew Martin for a visit, assigns him Nancy as his personal servant. Colbert and his daughter help Nancy escape, unscathed, into Canada. In an old-fashioned epilogue Willa Cather, aged five, sees Nancy's return as a middle-aged woman.

Willa Cather could not possibly write a bad novel; but Sapphira and the Slave Girl bears witness that she can write a dull one. This dullness, though, is the sum of many honest virtues: a nicely formed story, characters drawn with delicate authority, sharp, evocative vignettes of Virginia living & landscape. The whole work has the well-made, healthful, sober clarity of a Dutch interior. And like many unexceptionable people who inspire neither more nor less than respect, Sapphira is not too dull to be pleasant reading.

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