In a Desert Land. By Valentina Ilawtroy. (Constable and Co.
6a.)—A novelist has actually dared to write a story covering six hundred years and generations innumerable, woven on the slender connecting-thread of the religions aspiration of a family, of the ]Jydes of Cobham. Miss Ilawtrey seems untroubled by the passage of time, and plays as merrily with centuries as the average fiction-writer with weeks. She has devised, moreover, quite a new way of presenting an historical novel—we wish we could add, a wholly satisfactory way. Here is a story which opens in the year 1307, but so anxious has its author been to avoid the danger of false antiquity that she allows us for the most part to forget that we are not concerned with the twentieth century. We do not mean to imply by this that her capable work is in any way inadequate; it is brilliant in colouring, now and then, as in the account of the wake, exceedingly dramatic, and, we should imagine, historically correct. But Miss Hawtrey has preferred, both in choice of subject and in the writing of details, to depict human nature in its unalterable essentials, and the tendency to label it as of our own period is inevitable. We only wish that we could attain to her inde- pendence of dates, so that we might enjoy undisturbed her vivid and delightful style.
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