Anxious Angel

ALMA--Margaret Fuller--Morrow ($2). Here is a character less rare in life than in literature, an oversexed angel set down among men to minister to their wants as a slavey but never to be wanted for herself. Tall, strong, beautifully made, fine-skinned, middleaged, immaculate, actual Almas are "Cook" or "Nurse" in thousands of U. S. households. They go to the Scandinavian Church religiously. Their eyes grow moist easily over members of "the family."

Alma's need to love is expansive enough to embrace the whole "Free Country" (U. S. A.) of her adoption, and articulate enough to smother with its excess every possible husband. It is a need of such unusual and innocent intensity that Alma's story, much of it in broken English, hovers constantly between the exquisite and the absurd. To dare this hovering was a brave thing and Author Fuller's feat of bringing Alma credibly through from naive immigrant to disillusioned but still saintly New England housekeeper, is a remarkable one. Her repeated rejections, by men so various as Niels, a brutish fellow immigrant, and Eric Rasmussen, a now prosperous childhood friend in distant Walla Walla; her capture of a paralytic Civil War veteran; and the one proposal of her lifetime from the genteel but seedy "young master" of her final situation, would be ludicrous, were not Alma's extreme case handled with purpose of extreme purity.

The Author, long secretary and now wife of Poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, is grandniece of famed last-century Margaret Fuller* who edited The Dial with Emerson. The present Margaret Fuller is a quiet, industrious, self-critical lady who has let five years go by without releasing a novel to add to the reputation won for her with A New England Childhood (1916) and One World at a Time (1922). She lives at Norwichtown, Conn, (near New London).

* Born in 1810, she read Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere at the ase of 8 ; attended Groton School; taught in Bronson Alcott's school; became a feminist, Transcendentalist, brilliant conversationalist and essayist; reviewed books of Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, Poe, Lowell, et al., for the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley; was feted in England; married a dashing Italian; experienced and chronicled the Roman Revolution. Returning home, aged 40, she was shipwrecked and drowned off Fire Island, N. Y.