Admiral's Daughter

A Young Lady of Fashion tripped from between gay board covers this spring, ran up the scale of her unrestrained amours and crescendoed into nine U. S. editions in two months.* Britons capitulated even earlier to the vital, indiscreet Cleone when Lord Darling publicly declared: "Her diary must rank with ' that of Pepys' as a record of its time." Only an occasional reviewer dismissed the work as "that diverting hoax." Last week the "diarist" proclaimed herself. She is Magdalen King-Hall, 19, daughter of His Britannic Majesty's onetime Admiral Commanding on the Coast of Ireland (1906-08), Sir George Fowler King-Hall, K. C. B., retired.

Miss Knox, brown and shingled of hair, blue of eye, pert and minxful as her Cleone, declared to popeyed news gatherers: "I wrote the book in a few weeks, but, if I had realized so many distinguished people would have taken it seriously, I should have spent much more time and pains upon it.... I had wanted to write ever since I was a child, but everything I wrote was always returned. Then one day I got the idea of writing a 'diary'. . . .

"I'm afraid I knew very little about the 18th Century when I began. It is really the Middle Ages that thrill me. However, I went to the town library at Brighton/- and read up several 18th Century books. They were really all I had to go on. I was so surprised when my 'diary' was printed. . . ."

Reminded that occasional reviewers have found parts of her book "almost lascivious," she retorted: "Mv characters and the tales of them must have been true to their period else how should they have been accepted? I dare say there were many prim and proper people living in the 18th century, but every memoir of the time is abundant proof of the licentiousness which was rife in the beau monde. Naturally I did not choose a conventional bread-and-butter miss as my heroine."

Questioned further, she confessed to having spent most of her life in complete rusticity at Quinton. Castle, her father's seat at Portaferry, County Down, North Ireland. In the "diary" Quinton Castle appears under its Celtic name, Castle Kearney, a red herring unnoticed by reviewers.

Her U. S. Publishers (Appleton) made sheep's-eyes last week; professed to have supposed the work authentic when they published it; confessed to omitting all mention of its authenticity from their advertisements when they discovered it to be fictitious.

*THE DIARY OF A YOUNG LADY OF FASHION IN THE YEAR 1764-65--Cleone Knox-- Edited by Alexander Blacker Kerr--Appleton. (TIME, Feb. 15, BOOKS.) *Once famed as "the wittest high court judge in England." Recently retired after degenerating into what W.S. Gilbert called "that Nisi Prius nuisance, the Judicial humorist." /-A few gentlefolk still vacation at this British equivalent of Atlantic City.