Books: In Man's Image

LIVES OF WIVES—Laura Riding—Random House ($2.50).

"All women would like things to happen swiftly and largely—but, the things they would have happen being so different from the things likely to happen, most of them prefer slow, small lives to naked contact with the insufficiencies that their times and their husbands represent." Thus expatriate Poet Laura Riding compresses the theme of Lives of Wives, and invites readers to take another good look at history.

A collection of three historical novelettes, Lives of Wives draws its characters from three pre-Christian periods, the times 1) of Cyrus...