Books: Southern Impudence

SOUTHERN CHARM—Isa Glenn —Knopf ($2.50). There are few more ludicrous members of the U. S. population than the garrulous women who stray from rustic homes below the Mason & Dixon Line into the complicated excitements of Northern metropolitanism, there to stand, like cats in the rain, meowing about their cousins, Southern courtesy, and Robert E. Lee. These women are a small class; but they are a class which may be stamped upon vigorously, with the hobnailed heel of satire.

Isa Glenn writes about four such women; one is Mrs. Habersham, who, as she approaches old age, is entirely concerned with matters of sex which she should have outgrown; Mrs. Habersham resides with her elder and married daughter Alice May, who is stupider, prettier, lazier than her mother; visiting Alice May are her two aunts, Sallie and Natalie, both quite credibly prurient and unattractive. The entrance of Laura Habersham, Mrs. Habersham’s second daughter, who has so far forgotten her Southern breeding as to become the mother of a child without wedlock, strikes her mother, sister and aunts like an unaccustomed cold douche. The demure plot of Southern Charm consists of the anticipation and then the actuality of Laura’s arrival. But Author Glenn does not overlook the element of charm that prevents her female Southerners from being monsters. This is perhaps because she was born in Atlanta and has herself strayed Northward, not to meow, but to chuckle.