Beauty In Distress

GALLOWS' ORCHARD--Claire Spencer-- Cape & Smith ($2.50).

This is Author Spencer's first novel, yet it has been chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club for April in preference to such books as Author Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Great Meadow (TIME, March 3).* Book-of-the-Month selectors defend their choice by comparing Gallows' Orchard to the work of the late great Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy.

Heroine Erne Gallows is an orphaned Scotch girl, strong, passionate, beautiful. From her sailor father she inherits a reckless temper, an honest eye. The villagers mistrust her independence; they get drunk at her wedding but think her husband a queer, weak sort of man for her to pick. They are enlightened and glad when she is pregnant before her time. Her lover comes to the fair; there is a brawl, her husband is killed. Effie marries the schoolteacher, who has always loved her; a few months later her child is born, but it is weakly, and soon dies. Then the supposed murderer of her first husband is captured; Effie helps him escape, the village turns on her, stones her to death.

Written in a style more reminiscent of Author Richard Doddridge Blackmore (Lorna Doone) or of Bonn Byrne, Gallows' Orchard yet has in it something of the fateful quality of Hardy, something of the imminence of Hawthorne, something of the easy narrative of Stevenson.

The Author. Not only is Gallows' Orchard Author Claire Spencer's first novel, it is her first published work of any kind. A Scotch girl from Paisley (where the great Paisley shawls were made), she came to the U. S. 12 years ago, aged 19. An art student, Author Spencer paints "strange and surprising landscapes, which are the admiration of her friends," designed the jacket for her own book. She knows more artists than writers, reads few modern writers, has never read Thomas Hardy, to whose Tess of the D'Urbervilles her book has been compared.

* Author Thornton Wilder's The Woman of Andros (TIME, Feb. 24) was not submitted to any book club, by request of the author.

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