Lawless Lady

THE BOOK WITHOUT A NAME--Anonymous -- Brentano's ($2.50). The lady of this 18th Century journal seems to have lived in a quiet way, in a Hall, by a forest, with her natural son, a few friends and a few gypsies for company. Some evenings she would draw close to her bedroom fire and reflect upon her unconventional estate, her mother love, the perfection of her absent lover, passing events in politics, art, literature, or upon life itself as she found it in her solitude. The texture of her mind was altogether extraordinary, far in advance of its time, indeed of this time too. Only a few pages are necessary to convince the reader that here is no hoax like The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-65, published last winter by a whimsical Irish girl. Nor is there room left for wonder that this lady's descendants should have kept her journal in locked bureau drawers all these years.

The editor, one "E. R. P.", has headed each entry with" a quotation therefrom. One of these quotations appears .twice, being the thought most prominent in the lady's mind: "It is motherhood, not wifehood, that matters." She was an early feminist, having determined upon motherhood and compacted "earnestly" with her lover, a Baron, who drowned returning from Paris in 1763. "Let every woman be a mistress," she wrote, and projected a book on this theme, setting forth the naturalness of parenthood, the superiority of "naturals," the state's duty and the end of bawdry through free love.

She was an antiChristian, finding

Marcus Antoninus "as good or better than Jesus." She corresponded with Rousseau, whom she deemed to have known few fine women. She read Toland, Tindal, Hume, Locke, Grey, Campion, Herrick, Pope and Shakespeare, among others, never without intelligent commentary. On a pamphlet by John Woolman, the Quaker, noted that he had "used B. Franklin and D. Hall of Philadelphia" as his printers. "A new book," she said, "is always the event of the week."

Her phrases were most original. To describe the fop of her day she invented or hit upon the significant epithet, "awless." She called sky "an ancient scroll." She knew what was meant when her gypsy crone said: "She will never be lonely while pushing sticks into fire and watching them burn away." One evening she wrote: "The secrets of life that are discovered from age to age are as hard to find as a knife lost in rushes." She sympathized with the American colonists and aroused by George Ill's banishment of traitorous Jack Wilkes to ask: "Why is it that dogs are never hunted by weasels?"

Most amazing was her attitude towards her boy, Robert, and through him, towards society. She marked his birthdays as day of special grace for her. She let him wander naked, and herself too, beneath "the unastonished trees." Socrates, she felt, and many another sage, would have approved; her contemporaries "would rather face their God with naked souls than naked bodies," being disease-ridden, blotched and misshapen. She freed her boy from fear of the dark and the forest. She resolved, in one of the old fashioned phrases so fresh on her pen, to urge him out of the nest that he may learn to fly."

It is a notable, memorable book; vital, subtle, grave. Humor it lacks, but never a sombre simplicity. The family whose ancestress this lawless gentlewoman is owed a debt of honor as well as gratitude by those who read record. She wrote neither for pulication, criticism nor comment; simply as that rare creature, a self-sufficient woman self-communing . One of her phrases was this: "Death is an event in life man has not spoiled."