Martianess

UNFINISHED SYMPHONY -- Sylvia Thompson--Little, Brown ($2.50).

How would a visitor from Mars, who could speak English but not its idiom, acclimatize herself to the brittle sophistication of London's smart set? This is the question Authoress Thompson poses and tries to answer in Unfinished Symphony. Her title hints that she has not answered it altogether to her own satisfaction.

Though Helena hailed from nearer afield than Mars, the isolated life she had lived with her father on a Mediterranean island had kept her worlds apart from the rest of her smart English family. Her father, a disillusioned and successful playwright, had had both the money and the mind to fulfill his quixotic scheme: to bring up his favorite daughter in a nobly pagan vacuum, hermetically protected from the virus of a civilization he had forsworn. In mind and body Helena was as well-educated as he could make her; socially she was somewhat B.C. When her father died, Helena, a beautiful and dangerously idealistic girl, went back to her unknown family in England. Then the fireworks began.

Helena soon found she had nothing in common with most of her family, with most of her family's friends. They reciprocated heartily. At first her Martian attitude amused them. When she was taken to the House of Commons and shown the Prime Minister she asked whether he was heroic or corrupt. But women soon decided she was an impossible mixture of bluestocking and hoyden. Men thought her an eery combination of saint and goddess, made love to her as much as she would let them. Because he reminded her of her father and because she still believed in her father, Helena fell in love with the wrong man, her middleaged, politician brother-in-law Philip, and became his mistress. For a time Philip did well, for one of his years and training, but when he insisted on keeping the affair secret on account of his position. Helena sadly saw through him. Too young and passionate to be broken-hearted long, she sensibly accepted her second-best beau.

The Author, young (30). English-looking but pretty, wrote her first novel when she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl. At Somerville College, Oxford, "to escape eating oranges and playing the phonograph," she began The Hounds of Spring, her first bestseller. In 1926. the year it was published, she married Theodore Dunham Peter Luling, U. S. artist and fellow-student at Oxford, to whom (with Herbert George Wells) she had dedicated her book. She lives in Banbury. Oxfordshire but Unfinished Symphony was mostly written in Majorca. Authoress Thompson has two children. Rosemary & Elizabeth. Her ambition is to have six children, "innumerable friends and no ugly furniture." Other books: The Battle of the Horizons, Chariot Wheels, Portrait by Caroline.

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