Books: Womanly Strength & Weakness

NOT BY STRANGE GODS—Elizabeth Madox Roberts—Viking ($2.50).

Since 1932 Elizabeth Madox Roberts (The Time of Man, The Great Meadow) has published two novels, a book of verse, no short stories until this week. Not by Strange Gods is a set of six. They concern themselves 80% with sensitive females, 100% with Kentucky.

Best of them is The Betrothed, in which a farm girl, nudged subtly toward it by animals, the comments of her kin, the gruesome half-incantations of her grandmother over a vat of hogs' entrails, is curdled against marriage. Good too is Holy Morning, in which, in an almost magically beautiful atmosphere,...