A Bit of Blarney

BRIDIE STEEN (304 pp.)--Anne Crone --Scrlbner ($3).

Two publishers read Dublin-born Anne Crone's first novel and turned it down cold. Then an idea came to Miss Crone, 32, an Oxford graduate, and a teacher of languages in an Irish girls' school. She would send her manuscript to an old patron of Irish letters, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany. The Irish storyteller and playwright liked it so much that he volunteered to write an introduction, in which he calls Bridie Steen "one of the great novels of our time, not quite to be forgotten in a hundred years." With his handsome assist, Bridie Steen found a publisher at last.

The tribute says more for 70-year-old Lord Dunsany's generosity than it does for his literary judgment. Of his own writing, Lord Dunsany once said that it dealt with "the mysterious kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins." Bridie Steen deals with a more recognizable geography (the scene is the Irish border county of Fermanagh), but it is a land where sentiment is surrounded by sentimentality.

Bridie was the child of a Protestant father and a Catholic serving-girl mother. In border County Fermanagh, that was enough to brand her. When Bridie was orphaned, she was disowned by her father's Protestant family and brought up by her mother's sister, a dour, devout Catholic. Aunt Rose Anne instilled the fear of God in Bridie, a shy, spritelike creature who loved to run wild on the bog, disliked school and was passionately fond of easygoing Uncle James. When Uncle James died, Aunt Rose Anne went to work at the convent and Bridie hired out as a servant. It was nice at Miss Anderson's and all would have been well had not her father's wealthy, eccentric mother relented and taken Bridie into her home.

There began a battle for Bridie's soul, for Protestant Grandma Lisha could not abide Rome. When a cousin asked Bridie to marry him, she agreed to "turn" Protestant, and Aunt Lisha, delighted, left her everything when she died. But then came Catholic Aunt Rose Anne to invoke the wrath of the church, curse her roundly and give her a clout besides. Poor, sweet, ignorant Bridie, half demented by repeated bouts of intolerance, rushed wildly out of the house, was found dead in a boghole next day.

All this is told in a graceful, leisurely prose which gives Bridie Steen an oldfashioned, 19th Century quality found in few recent novels. But even on so quaint a dish, novelists today would not dare to serve up so cloying a mixture of Irish whimsy, gooey romance and tear-jerking melodrama.

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