Mademoiselle Ixe shared the difficulties of most first novels :
it journeyed from publisher to publisher, until "the very appearance of the manuscript . . . growing torn and dilapidated, was enough to condemn it" ; at last Mr. Fisher Unwin recognized its worth, and it achieved immediate success. Its author, Marie Hawker, was a gentle, quite unbeautiful woman, not in any way a great personality, but a most lovable girl, with enough mental energy to teach herself French, then German from a German-French grammar, then Italian from an Italian-German one : her biography, Lance Falconer (Nisbet and Co., 6s.), has been written by Miss Evelyn Maroh-Phillipps, whose recent death we regret to note. Many books of this kind are scarcely interesting to the outside world, but the life and letters of " Ls.noe Falconer," although they have no great dignity, are so informal, so personal, so full of real humour, that each chapter might well begin with " Do you remember? " ; and we no longer feel ourselves to be the outside world.
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