I could not, if I would, apply quite the customary severities of criticism to _Twilight_ (HUTCHINSON). It is too personal, and the death of its author, the clever woman who elected to be known as FRANK DANBY, is too fresh in memory for me to regard it with detachment. It is one of the tragedies of literature that only in her last two books, this and the one that preceded it, did the author give the world a taste of her true quality. There is evidence in _Twilight_ of gifts that might well have raised its writer to a place among the greatest. But frankly it is not possible to consider it apart from the circumstances of its origin. Two stories there are in it: one personal, autobiography at its most intimate; the other a work of imagination. It is supposed that the writer, a woman novelist, wrecked with disease and the drugs that bring endurance, goes down into the country and there becomes obsessed with the history of another woman, in circumstances much like to her own, who had once lived and loved in the same remote house. So, side by side, you have the two tragedies, one of the sick bed, one of the soul, both told with an incisive and compelling art, and with a realism often painful. But, as at once a document of fact and imagination, the book is perhaps unique. Certainly no one can read it without feeling that the death of its author has left literature poorer by the loss of a personality whose real power was yet to be shown.
The demand for an eleventh edition of Lord ERNEST HAMILTON'S book, _The First Seven Divisions_ (HURST AND BLACKETT) is no more than a deserved tribute to what has already taken rank as the best history, so far, of the most critical period of the World War. Lord ERNEST HAMILTON writes as one having authority. He tells the facts as he knows them--facts in many cases hitherto undisclosed, and given here with adequate detail and just; enough of explanation to make the account clear even to the most unmilitary reader. There has been no attempt by the writer to embellish his theme. It remains a simple story of sheer heroism, told in a straightforward soldierly manner--and the reading of it must make the most unemotional Briton feel the thrill of pride and pity and gratitude. "Nothing," says the writer, "can ever surpass, as a story of simple sublime pluck, the history of the first three months of England's participation in the Great War." This is what you can follow day by day in these pages. There are many new maps in the present edition, which greatly help to explain the situation, as it developed from Mons, through the battle of the Marne, to the trenches before Ypres. I can only say that I hope there will soon be few school libraries in which this most inspiring book has not an honourable place.