Shropshire Romance

THE HAPPY PRISONER (312 pp.) --Monica Dickens--Lippincott ($2.75).

Readers who like their fiction served with tea and crumpets in an atmosphere of tea cozies and grate fires will probably like this novel. In writing it, Author Dickens (great-granddaughter of Charles) pays her respects to the time-honored story of the patient--this one a wounded soldier--who falls in love with his nurse. But she has also created an affectionate picture of a Shropshire household. The Happy Prisoner exudes a country-fresh odor of plowed earth and drying horse blankets.

Hinkley Manor, which "had never been restored or preserved or quainted up with spinning-wheels and wrought-iron lanterns," is a world of feminine ideals in which many readers will discover a Victorian heritage. Readers may have the feeling that they have read it all before, but they will enjoy the quiet patrimony of English charm which the author settles on her people. The Happy Prisoner often trembles on the verge of sentimentality; what saves it from toppling over is Miss Dickens' ability to create characters who are intimately, almost tediously, convincing.

Tall, slender, and unmistakably English, 32-year-old Monica Dickens has the feminine fragility of her great-grandfather's heroines, but she is considerably stronger-minded. To get material for her first book, One Pair of Hands, she astonished her conservative, upper-middle-class family by becoming a cook. When the war came, she switched to nursing, found time to write another book, One Pair of Feet, and then spent a year working in a munitions factory.

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