Helen with the High Hand. By Arnold Bennett. (Chapman and
Hall. 6s.)—On opening a new novel by Mr. Arnold Bennett the reader enjoys all the pleasure of complete uncertainty as to which of his many manners the novelist has chosen to employ. Ile may further entertain himself by looking at the fly- leaf facing the title-page and seeing that Mr. Arnold Bennett himself arranges his works under the following heads :—Novels,
• I Will ,faintaiii. Ey Marjorie Bowen. London : Methuen and Co. [5s..1 Fantasias, Short Stories, Belles-Lettres, Drama. Lastly, he speaks of the two books in which he collaborated with Mr. Eden Phillpotts as romances. The present novel, if it were not a long connected story, would come under the head of "Short Stories." It reads as if it were an expansion of one of the "Tales of the Five Towns," and is concerned with the particular borough of Bursley, with which all Mr. Bennett's readers are familiar. The Helen of the title is a schoolmistress with an inordinate love of dress, who moves to Burnley from Longshaw, a place "which is at the other end of the Five Towns," in order to be near the man she has fallen in love with. Incidentally she thinks it would be a good thing first to captivate and then keep house for a rich bachelor uncle, James 011erensbaw by name, who is the real hero of the story. The account of Helen's attack on her uncle's defences by means of a superlative kidney omelette is most amusingly given, and the whole story is light and easy reading. Helen, in spite of her love of dress, is a good creature, for she does not in the least resent her uncle at the end of the book suddenly marrying a lady of middle age, whom he of course takes to be the mistress of the magnificent mansion which Helen has made him buy. Helen herself marries the man with whom she has always been in love, and retires with perfect complacency to a semi- detached villa and one servant. If Mr. Arnold Bennett gives his readers no problem in this story, he at any rate furnishes them with plenty of amusement.
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