Eve Triumphant. By Pierre de Coulevain. Translated from the French
by Alys Hallard. (Hutchinson and Co. 6s.)—Another " point of view" about Americans, if not about America, is offered us through a pair of French spectacles in Eve Triumphant. The most curious topsy turvy feeling is created in the reader by the perusal in excellent English of a book in which" Britishers "are overlooked, and the world belongs to the French and Americans, with an Italian thrown in in the appropriate part of jeune premier. The book being by a Frenchman, the keynote thereof is naturally feminism. And the feminism of the American woman is a delightful new study to the Frenchman. We can hear the sub-current of his reflections running through the book. His surprise is great when his native talent for analysis forces him in spite of himself to write of a woman who is si pen femme, and his joy commensurate when he can so twist the story as to put his heroine into a suitable position of inferiority to man through the influence of love. The book is called Ere Triumphant, which seems a singularly inappropriate title, for Adam is dis- tinctly the person who scores, though it must at once be said in defence of M. de Coulevain that the serpent is "out of it" altogether.
Previous page
