As a piece of passionate and nerve-racking catharsis, Miss Scott's
autobiography, Escapade (Cape, 7s. 6d.) has un- deniable merits, although the same tendency to over-writing and hysteria, which exasperated one in her long novel, The Wave, is again apparent. In spite of this monotonous inten- sity she does manage to give a vivid account of her youthful life of misery in Brazil, to which she had fled with her lover, who was a married man, and where in the revolting squalor of the tropics she bore him a child. The relationship and its development is considerably blurred, and the last chapter is nothing more than a confusing allegorical nightmare. But the book is interesting as a frank exposure of the emotions of one who has, rather self-consciously, " defied society " ; as an unwitting revelation of the tortures of persecution mania, and as a morbid presentation of the exotic scene and its people. The hotel keepers, doctors, servants, prostitutes, midwives and gimcrack soldiery among whom poverty obliged her to live are terribly real though drawn by a corroded pen. It is a thousand pities that Miss Scott has no sense of humour or, what amounts to the same thing, a sense of proportion, for she has in her the makings of a fine descriptive talent.
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