23 JUNE 1923, Page 19

Anderby Wold. By Winifred Holtby. (The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d.)

This is a good first novel, for the author has a strong sense of situation that should make her successful were she to attempt a play. She writes a serviceable but undistinguished English, and her delineation of the shrewd emotions and thoughts of the older Yorkshire farming folk is convincing. To express the deeper feelings of men and women, however, as not yet within the compass of her art, for her love scenes and soliloquies are scrappy and hurried, her figures becoming at such times mere dolls.