27 NOVEMBER 1936, Page 35

LETTERS FROM LIMBO By Ernest Rhys Here is a book

(Dent, 10s. 6d.) of special appeal to that important section of the British public who attend when novelists lecture, are energetic with library lists, and love to look at views of the week-end cottages of their favourite authors. Most of these letters, many of them reproduced in facsimile, are from literary men and women of the past and present (but not rising) generations, and consist of personal gossip, book business and exchange of compliments—in fact, the very essence of those literary tea-parties on the Golder's Green slopes of Parnassus. But, of course, the Editor of Everyman, the Camelot Classics and other series knew some giants too ; and we must be grateful to him for provoking, among other things, the firmly tactful postcard from Gladstone, characteristic missives from Mr. Bernard Shaw, and the melancholy refusal from Colonel Law- rence—all in reply to invitations to write or reprint. The book also sheds a little light on the early years of men of genius like Yeats and W. H. Davies,

and provides here and there a commen- tary not without value on literary ventures of the last forty years.