Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement
by Sir New York: The Macmillan Company. 1920. 12mo, x+396 pp. $2.00.
ALTHOUGH Sir Harry Johnston’s new novel, like The Gay-Dombeys, gives the impression that it was written in high spirits, ‘just for fun,’ the author is at bottom intensely serious. His subject suggests even solemnity, and yet his off-hand air never wholly forsakes him. Telling his story more directly and lucidly than in his former novel, he still preserves his freedom of comment, humor, and satire, writing often so much in the mood of an essayist that it is hardly too much to say that his own personality is his most interesting character.
His heroine is Vivian, or Vivie, Warren, the same Vivie first introduced to us by Bernard Shaw in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Vivie studies law, is admitted to the bar, — how it came about makes too good a story to spoil by anticipation, — is imprisoned for burning stables, is expatriated at the outbreak of the war, and spends the four terrible years in Brussels under German occupation.
One’s first impulse is to ask, ‘ Why drag in Mrs. Warren and her malodorous past at all?’ and there are times during the opening chapters when the reader is inclined to propose to the author the question that Praed asks Vivie: ‘ But aren’t you unnecessarily coarse?’ But with the progress of the story. Sir Harry makes more and more clear his conviction that Mrs. Warren (who, by the way, is not unworthy of Shaw himself) and her profession have an important part in the narrative; and implies, as, indeed, Shaw did long ago. that the woman’s movement more than any other force is relegating Vivie’s mother and all she stands for to a past that, in the novel, at any rate, seems almost prehistoric.
Vivie is an epitome of all that was best in the suffragette and the woman war-worker. Intensely in earnest, she is still no prig. Her goodness is that of a person too busy with important projects ever to give the condition of her soul a thought. In Shaw’s play she left her mother in rage and disgust; in the novel, she seeks out her mother and stands steadfastly by her until death releases her from responsibility.
As for the other characters, Rossiter, the biologist, bears some resemblance to Morven in The Gay-Dombeys, and, temperamentally, at least, one may suppose, to Sir Harry himself. His wife, Linda, childish, helpless, empty-headed, dying heroically trying to do her bit, is unforgettable, as is Bertie Adams, pursuing to his death an unexpressed passion that is as comprehensible as it is foolish.
The circumstantial account of the suffragette riots and the German occupation of Belgium never impedes the course of the story— that is, the pilgrimage of Vivie’s soul. What Vivie is, wishes to be, becomes, is virtually the story of womankind during the last twenty years. Just why a man possessing the author’s unique experience in science, exploration, and adventure chose this subject is an interesting question. One can only suppose that at sixty or thereabouts he finds civilization and the civilizing work of woman a more interesting study than tropical zoölogy or Bantu dialects. R. M. G.