Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914Various
History
Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
A story by Mr. DION CLAYTON CALTHROP, with the title _Wonderful Woman_
(HODDER AND STOUGHTON), may almost be regarded as a work of expert
reference. Because what he does not know about The Sex, and has not
already written in a galaxy of engaging romances, is hardly worth the
bother of remembering. So that his views on the matter naturally command
respect. _Wonderful Woman_ is perhaps less a novel than an
analysis--painfully close, with a kind of regretful brutality in it--of
one special type of femininity, and a glance at several others. Perhaps
its realistic quality may astonish you a little. You may have been
delighting in Mr. CALTHROP'S fantastic work (as I do myself) and yet
have cherished the suspicion that his Columbines and Chelsea fairies and
Moonbeam folk generally were the creations of a sentimentalist who would
have little taste for handling unsympathetic things. Well, if so,
_Philippina_ is the answer to that. Here is the most masterly
portraiture of a woman utterly without imagination or heart or anything
except a kind of futile and worthless attraction, that I remember to
have met for some time. As I say, it is all rather astonishing from Mr.
CALTHROP. The men who love _Flip_, and whose lives are ruined by her,
are easier to understand. About _Sir Timothy Swift_, for example, there
is a touch of the Harlequin, or rather Pierrot, that betrays his
origin. I will not tell you the story, for one reason because its charm
is too elusive to retrieve. I content myself by saying that it seems to
me the best work we have yet had from Mr. CALTHROP, combining his
special and expected graces with an unusual and moving sincerity.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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