Convict's Girl

JULIE--Francis Stuart--Knopf ($2.50).

Julie Harben was a pale, pretty, South African girl with a bad limp, a big sister and an overwhelming fear of the world. London doctors took care of the limp, a prim precise Londoner married her big sister, but Julie's fear of the world was harder to get rid of. In Julie, Francis Stuart traces the process in a straightforward book that is notable for its characterization of a 15-year-old girl, especially notable in view of the books by Author Stuart that have preceded it. He won critical acclaim with The Colored Dome and Pigeon Irish--imaginative, poetical, mystical novels in which metaphors skyrocketed and prose flickered so brightly that characters and plot were hard to make out. Julie is plain as an old shoe. For Author Stuart describes Julie's conquering of her fear of the world as a slow process, almost imperceptible, taking place principally when she is unaware of it.

Julie's sister was too respectable to take a job as typist for an ambitious, vulgar, unscrupulous insurance assessor named Goldberg, so Julie took it herself. Before she was 16 she knew that Goldberg was an arsonist, and that she loved him. By the time she was 17 she had become, briefly and unpleasantly, his mistress.

When he was growing wealthy and in danger of arrest, she tried to burn his incriminating papers, failed, and watched him go to prison. For the seven years that he was there, frightened Julie rebounded between the stuffy, self-righteous world of her sister, and the rebellious, desperate, exciting world to which Goldberg had introduced her. An Irish boy fell in love with her, carried her off to Ireland to live with his parents until she could make up her mind to marry him. Julie loved him too, loved Ireland, tried to disinfect her speech and thoughts to conform with a pleasant, proper environment. But when the showdown came she streaked back to London to meet a chastened, honest Goldberg on his release, realized that only when she was with him was she in the thick of things.

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