Books: British Family Life

SLEEP IN PEACE—Phyllis Bentley—Macmillan ($2.50).

DAUGHTERS AND SONS—I. Compton-Burnett—Norton ($2.50).

So many British novels are family chronicles that modern British fiction sometimes looks more like contributions to Burke's Landed Gentry than to literature. Last week two better-than-average female British novelists added two more family chronicles to the lengthening shelf.

In Sleep in Peace, the partners in a Yorkshire textile mill, Alfred Armistead, liberal Conservative, and Henry Hinch-liffe, conservative Liberal, are posed as two representative, conflicting types of Victorian capitalism. Their children are involved in the conflict that dissolves the partnership, are nevertheless drawn together in their common rebellion against their parents. Author Bentley makes...