Miss Storm Jameson has followed up her much-discussed Pitiful Wife
with a novel of a very different kind at an alarm- ingly short interval. The Pitiful Wife- was a strange book. One could never tell from one moment to the next whether it was unusually bad or unusually good—certainly it was not mediocre. And equally certainly it was serious. Lady Susan and Life is a squib, and one of the most light-hearted published in recent years. It has practically no plot to it, but is more properly a series of short stories, all somehow or other hung about the neck of the elegant Lady Susan. These stories are mostly purr: farce—a farce at times a little too much overdone to be really funny. But as in The Pitiful Wife one would suddenly be surprised at the end of passages of pure melodrama by an incident or passage suggestive of nothing short of genius, so in Lady Susan, just when one has decided that the whole thing is nothing but rather dull knock- about, one comes on a passage of quite exquisite wit.
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