Bittersweet

THE CAPTAIN'S WIFE -- Storm Jameson -- Macmillan ($2.50).

Margaret Storm Jameson's Yorkshire novels are as tough and interrelated as the roots of a bush. Latest offshoot, The Captain's Wife, is not part of her big novel-in-progress, The Mirror in Darkness, but it shares some of the same characters. And they, like all the berries on Storm Jameson's bush, are as bittersweet as ever.

Sylvia Russell, the captain's wife, in this sharply competent book, hated her daughter Hervey's easy-mannered husband because he was without character, "the most damning thing a Yorkshireman can say about man or woman." This leisurely, detailed portrait of Sylvia's married life shows that she herself, like a good Jameson heroine, had enough for six. She eloped with one of her shipowning mother's captains, stubbornly refused to patch the break even when it meant stinting her children, kept moving from house to house in windy Danesacre (Author Jameson's native Whitby), walking on the moors, quarreling with her port-bibbing mother-in-law, ignoring her garrulous sailor husband on his brief visits home. Never able to compromise, to "say with fools and saints, it was for the best," Sylvia's hard shell cracked only once--when her son's plane was shot down in the War. Old age found her blunt-speaking, crotchety as ever, her only weakness dreaming of foreign ports and cities she had known as a girl. Death, when at long last it came, found her still unreconciled with life.

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