THE STRANGE WOMAN

by Ben Ames Williams '10, Houghton Mifflin, 1941, 684 pp.$2.75.

IN THE PREFACE to this novel, Mr. Williams declares that "before the actual writing began, the central character assumed command of the book." He adds an assurance that all the chief characters are fictitious. Both statements are easily credible.

The central figure is Jenny Hager, a woman so strange that during her lifetime only seven or ten men (and no woman except Lena Tempest) knew her for what she was. She did not know, but finally offered a split-personality plea in self-defense. Outwardly respectable and pious, esteemed as a devoted daughter, wife, and mother, a leading citizeness of Bangor, a temperance-crusader and Abolitionist, the Jekyll-Hyde Jenny slyly indulged and increased her secret taste for adultery and sadism until it simply wore her out. She died, appropriately, soon after the public Civil War, having sufficiently corrupted or bedevilled the lives of her father, two husbands, a step-son, four sons, and a spare deacon. Back in 1812, when she was four years old, the first man that knew her for "what she was" attached himself to her mother and was luckily killed in battle.

The long story is told in seven chapters, admirably planned to present the seven successive viewpoints of the one happy warrior and six of Jenny's victims. Mr. Williams has managed this method with great technical skill and has made the results more coherent than most of his previous work. Interesting historical facts about the lumber-industry in Maine and the Battle of Gettysburg are vividly interwoven. And the gradual portrayal of Jenny has real power; she becomes an unforgettable vampire. But this reviewer cannot help feeling that the woman is too strange, and rather absurd.