Books: Pre-War Tale

SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL—Willa Cather—Knoft ($2.50).

This week appeared Willa Cather's first novel in five years. It is an immaculately written account of a few months in the life of a family in Virginia. The year is 1856. The family is that of sober, plebeian Henry Colbert and his subtle, suffering, tony wife, Sapphira. They live, well-supplied with slaves, a little beyond the edge of civilization, within the fringes of the mountains. Sapphira's widowed daughter, an abolitionist at heart, does good among the mountaineers and the slaves. Sapphira's husband, another, spends most of his time at the mill, earnestly reads Bunyan's...