Woman's Place

WOMAN’S place,’men are fond of telling her, ’is in the home. Every woman, Virginia Woolf answers for her sex, should have a room of her own and a little money to go with it. And the fact is that whether that room be in a palace, a studio, or in Hull House, the occupant is becoming more and more a person to he reckoned with.

IT would be tempting to consider the three books before us as answers to Mrs. Woolf’s appeal to women to ‘write all kinds of books. It is still too soon to determine whether the procession pressing forward with the year’s offering is the denser or the more various for her exhortation. Moreover, Mrs. Woolf—or was it Mary Beton? — addressed an audience definitely intellectual and definitely intent upon literary achievement. Avoiding, if possible, the use of the epithet ‘intellectual’ (equally offensive, as a rule, whether bestowed or withheld), let us say that these three autobiographies are not primarily literary works: they owe their virtue, as they owe their diversity, to the qualities of the women whose significant experiences they record.

Education of a Princess, by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia (Viking Press, $3.50), is written by thedaughter of tbeTsar Alexander III’syoungest brother. Her mother died before the child was two years old, and the Grand Duke Paul’s subsequent morganatic marriage resulted in his banishment, so that Marie and her brother were handed over at an early age to their uncle Serge, husband of the Tsarina’s sister. The rigorous conventionality of the children’s bringing-up was neutralized by the vehement personalities about them and the violent drama of the last decades of the Russian Empire, upon which a lonely, clever, and repressed little girl had ample opportunity to reflect. Very nearly half the book is devoted to the catastrophe. As head nurse in the military hospital at Pskov, the Grand Duchess could appreciate the tragic mismanagement, of the war. Rasputin’s murder and her brother Dmitri’s share in it estranged her from the royal family without making her Jess a Romanoff in the eyes of the people. Then came the revolutions, the Tsar’s death, her father’s imprisonment and her own flight.

To appreciate the detachment, the absence of selfpity with which all this is set down, one has only to glance at her stepmother’s, Princess Paley’s, record of the same events. To the Grand Duchess the principal sufferer is not herself, but Russia. But she learned her philosophy early, like the author of the Journal de Cinquante Ans, to which this hook presents so striking a parallel; and, like Madame de la Tour du Pin, she wears her resolute courage light-heartedly. They are alike, too, in the energy and determination that enabled them to adapt themselves successfully to undreamed-of conditions, and in their genius for detail of mysterious charm. There is here a fairy-tale exactness about Catherine the Great s diamond cherry-bobs and the ritual of the Grand Duchess Serge’s dressing for dinner.

Background nilh Figures (Houghton Mifflin, $5.00) repeats the motif of the motherless and solitary child receiving impressions of an intensity unsuspected by those about her. But Cecilia Reaux’s solitude was burn of her artistic endowment and her inherited New England passion for independence — a solitude, one gathers, not only voluntary but jealously guarded. She was brought up in a devoted circle of elders, who took it as a matter of course that she should inherit talents of a distinguished order.

Her brilliant success is scarcely touched on here; characteristically all that followed her student years in Paris is compressed into less than a third of the book, and then appears as little more than a record of the people with whom the accident of painting brought her into contact. And as a record, it must be confessed, it is somewhat disappointing, until one remembers that it is at the portraits themselves that one must look to know what she found in the diversified stream of her sitters. In this book for once the portrait painter’s interest is the background; the figures emerge hazily, if at all, with one striking exception — her grandmother, Mrs. Leavitt. But Mrs. Leavitt, after all, belongs to the background — present to the child’s earliest consciousness as a comfortable black shoulder.

The account of the family circle is delightful; the gift of recalling domestic atmospheres with such precise charm is as plainly inherited from her French forbears as her name. So with the pleasure afforded by textures and light: other children have received their ‘first impressions of sensuous joy’ from the arrowy rush of Mallory brook under layered light and shade; other children have been read to while they sat on cool matted floors in rooms shuttered against August sun, or have experienced vivid emotion on seeing a face across a schoolroom; but how few can reproduce in any medium — in memory even — the exquisite variety of sensation that Miss Beaux records as clearly in prose as in the white against white of her portrait of Mrs. Richards.

The Second Twenty Yearsal Hull House (19091929), by Jane Addams (Macmillan, $4.00), this reviewer dare not attempt to estimate except in its narrowest, aspect of ‘autobiographical notes’ — the publishers’ subtitle. Miss Addams herself calls it ‘A Record of a Growing World-Consciousness’; but as one turns to the chapter headings and finds the Progressive Party, the Women’s Suffrage movement, the efforts toward peace, the post-war reaction of fear, repression, and prohibitions, tlie Eighteenth Amendment and its consequences, our recent immigration policy, and the tendencies of the last twenty years toward a ‘humanized justice,’one may be forgiven for questioning the applicability of titles or subt itles. To questions of any sort the answer is, ‘Read it.’ Autobiography in this form may be scarcely recognizable to those whose world is sensation, but that is all the more reason for commending it to the attention of Mary Ret on.

‘ It is fatal for a woman to lay stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause,’ said Mary Reton wisely. And, glancing back at those chapter headings, one sees in what struggles Miss Addams has been involved, what grievances, what pleas might have been hers. Yet not. since Nausicaa first sat down in Trapani to describe her old nursery has any woman written an autobiography with less bitterness and indignation. She avoids acidity on the one hand and complacency on the other. She neither exhorts nor rebukes, nor even, like the saints themselves, inquires, ’How long?' Instead (p. 202): ‘All diversity ... if wisely handled may lead to something new which neither side possesses. . . . “Integration occurs in the sphere of activities, of desires, of interest. . . . This necessity for united action and tlie belief that mutual interests should take the place of discussion tend to make cooperation easier than ever before. Whether this wisdom and charity be the fruits of Mary Reton’s marriage of opposites or of Saint Janies the Greater’s fulfilling of the royal law, the hook is to be recommended alike to the impatient, the angry, the complacent, and the despairing — devotees of A Room of One Own.

MARIAN VATRUANT