Books in Brief

Love Among the Daughters, by Elspeth Huxley (Morrow, $5.95). Three hundred pages of the memories of a young woman who spent the years covered in studying agriculture and being shy at parties?—Unpromising—but the young woman was Elspeth Huxley, ah! And the time was the Twenties; her generation was “tired of compromise, of safety-first and bowlered Baldwin,” and she herself was “anxious to collect experiences as one might collect stamps or cigarette cards; they were the capital of life, they could be hoarded, and in sufficient quantities would bring about a desirable condition known as maturity.” Collect she did, as did the two girl-cousins who flit in and out of her recollections, but she went into the Great Depression with fingers not seriously burned. Out of Africa she comes, to a real-life Cold Comfort Farm peopled by quietly mad relatives; then to the ugly redbrick University of Reading to cuddle in parked punts and go down to Swinging London for an occasional thé dansant complete with crooners and saxophones; then across the Atlantic (while young Americans were hell-bent for Paris, it seems, young Britishers were flocking to America) to Cornell, sorority rushing, bootleg hooch that could make you blind, and all those friendly, candid, smiling, smiling Americans with their endless landscape and turgid, untidy national past. Bundled and tied, it’s a happy time of discoveries, adventures and misadventures of a good-hearted, open-eyed and open-minded girl; the memories transcend party-chat and girls’ gossip because of Mrs. Huxley’s interest in people (she seems never to have met a total bore and never to have felt scorn for anyone) and her marvelous eye —and ear, nose, finger-and toe-tips—that enable her to bring it all back forty years after. There is an extended summoning of the sights, sounds and smells of a foxhunt that is almost Proustian. No pictures; too bad.

C. H. SIMONDS

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Love Among the Daughters, by Elspeth Huxley (Morrow, $5.95). Three hundred pages of the memories of a young woman who spent the years covered in studying agriculture and being shy at parties?—Unpromising—but the young woman was Elspeth Huxley, ah! And the time was the Twenties; her generation was “tired of compromise, of safety-first and bowlered Baldwin,” and she herself was “anxious to collect experiences as one might collect stamps or cigarette cards; they were the capital of life, they could be hoarded, and in sufficient quantities would bring about a desirable condition known as maturity.” Collect she did, as did the two girl-cousins who flit in and out of her recollections, but she went into the Great Depression with fingers not seriously burned. Out of Africa she comes, to a real-life Cold Comfort Farm peopled by quietly mad relatives; then to the ugly redbrick University of Reading to cuddle in parked punts and go down to Swinging London for an occasional thé dansant complete with crooners and saxophones; then across the Atlantic (while young Americans were hell-bent for Paris, it seems, young Britishers were flocking to America) to Cornell, sorority rushing, bootleg hooch that could make you blind, and all those friendly, candid, smiling, smiling Americans with their endless landscape and turgid, untidy national past. Bundled and tied, it’s a happy time of discoveries, adventures and misadventures of a good-hearted, open-eyed and open-minded girl; the memories transcend party-chat and girls’ gossip because of Mrs. Huxley’s interest in people (she seems never to have met a total bore and never to have felt scorn for anyone) and her marvelous eye —and ear, nose, finger-and toe-tips—that enable her to bring it all back forty years after. There is an extended summoning of the sights, sounds and smells of a foxhunt that is almost Proustian. No pictures; too bad.

C. H. SIMONDS