Books: I Remember Mama

TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT (272 pp.]—Claire Leighfon—Rlneharf ($3.50).

Early in the century a fine, fiery Irish-Cornish lady named Marie Connor Leighton wrote throbbing serial stories with titles like Fires of Love and Sealed Lips. A copy boy waited in the hallway of her house in St. John's Wood, London, to dash with the latest installments to Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail. The income kept her household going: six servants, four dogs, three children, a secretary and a husband.

In Tempestuous Petticoat, one of the children, Clare Leighton, now a U.S. wood engraver, has set out to remember mania...