“Veronica Quening, with a dour and brutal market gardener (who is also a local preacher) for her father, but also with a devoted stepmother, entirely free from traditional stepmotherliness, is quite staggeringly fascinating, lovely, and magnetic. She has all our sympathy in her career as school teacher, as wife for a time—after another passionate love affair—of a German; and specially as friend of Lord Swathe, for there is evidently a kinship between the beautiful girl and the stately noble house. All ends well with Veronica.”—The Times [London] Lit Sup
“Harmless and pretty and silly.”
+ − Ath p258 F 20 ’20 80w
“Veronica, with her complexities, her ambitions, her mental and spiritual endowments, her surface froth and her profound depths, is a creation that would do credit to an older and more practiced hand. As a whole, the novel is an exceptionally good first book, which reveals a real gift for story telling and a marked faculty for producing the illusion of reality.”
+ − N Y Times 25:31 Jl 11 ’20 550w + The Times [London] Lit Sup p290 F 5 ’20 110w
PATRICK, GEORGE THOMAS WHITE. Psychology of social reconstruction. *$2 Houghton 301
20–19443
In considering the dangers that threaten our present civilization—reversion to barbarism, decadence, ill-timed social reforms, et al.—the author maintains that he is not taking the usual attitude of either advocate or critic, but that of a student of ultimate values. He sees in our present awareness of social evils a hopeful sign, but insists on the inadequacy of all economic and political reforms that disregard the psychological and historical factors. No reform can endure whose psychological basis does not rest on human needs and does not conform to human nature. The three first chapters are devoted to the psychological factors in social reconstruction and the remaining four to: The psychology of work; Our centrifugal society; Social discipline; The next step in applied science. There is an index.