STRANGE MARRIAGE. By Netta Syrett. (Geoffrey Bles. 7s. 6d.)—Miss Syrett's
book develops a situation well enough, but unfortunately it is a situation which for modern readers has only an academic interest. Given a boy of fifteen, whose ignorance of the facts of life is unpleasantly shattered, leaving him with a permanent difficulty : given a girl of eighteen, likewise completely ignorant, who enters his life when he is thirty-seven, and is persuaded to marry him : anybody can work this up into a passable story, set against a background of the 'nineties, with liberal allusions to Beardsley, Wilde, and the rest. Forty years ago such a situation might well have arisen, and the " strange marriage " might have gone as Miss Syrett says it did : but what about it? If she was out to demonstrate anything, the author has rigged her demonstration by choosing a special case. Probably she intended only entertainment. As such the book is readable, but undistinguished.
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