Great English Short Novels
edited and with an introduction by Dial, $6.00.
After describing the factors which he believes determine a good short novel and remarking wistfully that the English have never equaled the best American products in this field (he names The Aspern Papers and, surprisingly, The Great Gatsby), Mr, Connolly presents eleven first-class items. They range from Dr. .Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage—a novel by virtue of the fact that Savage was an incorrigible liar to the evocative, ambiguous Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf’s last work. In between come Maria Edgeworth, be Fanu, Mrs. Gaskell, Eliot, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, Meredith, Peacock, and Hazlitt. Some of these authors may look offhand like museum pieces, but every one of them proves to be very much alive.