The Woman Errant. By " The Commuter's Wife." (Macmillan and Co.
6s.)—People who have an old-fashioned prejudice in favour of a book being either "fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring" had better avoid the new book by the author of the "Diary of a Commuter's Wife." This book is neither the " fish " or "flesh" of a book on domesticity and gardening, the "fowl" of a diary of intimate reflections, nor the "good red herring" of a genuine novel. It is, as a matter of fact, a mixture of all four, and the different parts are decidedly inharmonious. The fiction waits with irritating delay on the reflections, and the domesticities are for ever interrupted by the necessity of the reader readjusting his standpoint to that required for belief in the persons of the story. Even this does not entirely exhaust the list of crimes which the author has committed in the book, for The Woman Errant is also "a novel with a purpose." In themselves the different fragments are not bad. The fiction is the least successful, though even here the character-drawing is well done. But, as a whole, the book cannot be called a success,—if, indeed, it deserves the name of book, and should not rather rank as "a fortuitous concourse of literary atoms."
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