Shorter Notices
English Women. By Edith Sitwell (Collins. as. 6d.)
THE get-up of the " Britain in Pictures " series would be an achieve- ment in book production at any time, but under war conditions the charm and distinction of the volumes brings rare refreshment of the spirit. If other numbers were attractive, the present addition in a Wedgwood blue is entrancing : the generous illustrations, both coloured plates and black-and-white, are beautifully reproduced, and there is one tailpiece in particular, that of Grasmere for Dorothy Wordsworth,' which is—well, fit for Dorothy Wordsworth. Miss Sitwell has selected certain outstanding personalities for biographical sketches linked together by the " argument " of the Introduction. This lights on many themes which it would have been extremely interesting to see Miss Sitwell illumine further if space had allowed, but as it is the reader would do well to re-read the Introduction at intervals between the sketches. In any anthology it is inevitable to quarrel with what is included or excluded, and here it seems a pity that if Miss Sitwell thinks so poorly of Jane Carlyle she did not let her give place to one of the Blue-stockings, to Mrs. Montagu or Mrs. Delany, and, finely- worded obituary notice as it is, the sketch of Virginia Woolf shows a certain lack of objectivity in selection from among a generation which also produced Mrs. Pankhurst, Nurse Cavell—or Amy Johnson. The Rossetti grandfather and father of Byron's doctor was, of course, Polidori, not Polidari.
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