FICTION.
JANE—OUR, STRANGER.
Jane—Our Stranger. By Mary Borden. (London a Heine. mann. is. 6d. net.) MISS MARY BORDEN, an American author, has chosen a very piquant theme in her analysis of the mental attitude of an
American heiress brought up in the Middle West and married to a decadent member of the French nobility. The book will undoubtedly arrest the reader's attention, although it has many faults. In the first place, Miss Borden allows herself a certain familiarity in style which is irritating to the serious reader. The story is in two parts, both written in the first person, and the author employs a very common mechanism for getting over the difficulties of this method of narration. To take an early instance, we find this sentence :—
" Conceited ? I suppose we were ; but then you see the world did knock at our door for admittance."
Few things are more tiresome than the convention of a supposed question on the part of the reader to the author and its inevitably crushing answer. The reader will always object in his own mind that he would have asked nothing of the sort, and if he finds too many of these queries he will be apt to shut the book with a bang and say he will have none of it. Another literary fault in the book is that, though, as said above, the two parts of the book are written in the first person, they are written by different persons—the first by the brother-in-law of Jane, the principal character, and the second by Jane herself. Now this being the case, Part II. should surely be in a different style from Part I. ; but the writing of it is in exactly the same idiom, though as Jane's portion is narrated to her brother-in-law, the irritating retorts may be supposed to be made to him and not to the reader.
It is worth while to point out the faults in this story because of the arresting power which the author undoubtedly possesses. Whether or not her pictures of the modern Faubourg Saint Germain are true—and it is much to be hoped for the sake of the French nation that they are not true—the reader is assured of the credibility of the pictures offered to him, and most of the characters depicted are extremely life-like. As we read we believe fully in Jane and in her decadent little husband, while the sketches of the old Marquise and of the famous French Conseil de famine are entirely convincing. Bianca, the vampire of the piece, is unnaturally depraved, and is so like the villainesses of Adelphi melodrama that she is out of key with the rest of the book, while Claire, the sister-in-law, is a shadow. In the following lines the author gives an extra- ordinarily vivid picture of the busy emptiness of the social round of a fashionable woman :— " I followed Bianca, Jane, and Claire in imagination, moving about Paris in smooth rapid motors, slipping in and out of crowded
streets, shops, drawing-rooms, theatres, watching each other. But how could Claire see one pursuing the other with all those people round them, all the music, the waiters, the footmen, the lights scattered along dinner-tables, the obstructing tables and chairs, the endless engagements ? My mind wavered,1 felt dizzy. I saw each one of the three women stepping out of her car, going into her house, the door closing upon her, hiding her from the world."
It would be unfair to say that the book is itself decadent in tone. It is merely the photograph of a state of society so decadent as to leave an exceedingly unpleasant taste in the mouth of the reader. It may be supposed that so sharp an impression could not have been made without the extreme length to which the story runs, but it must be owned that there is a good deal of repetition, and that every now and then the reader will be frankly bored.
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