Sharp-Eyed Yorkshirewoman

LOVE AND MONEY (256 pp.)--Phyllis Bentley--Macmi/lan ($3).

Much modern fiction is literature of escape--from class, race, creed, country, or even the sex in which the writer was born. The disadvantage of the escapee is that he is obliged to change his clothes to prevent detection. Novelist Phyllis Bentley has chosen to wear the sober broadcloth of her native Yorkshire, to remain and write about what she knows--the Yorkshire Tyke (English slang for York-shireman). In 19 books during the past 35 years she has "celebrated her chosen slab of earth--Yorkshire's West Riding.

In the seven stories of her new book, Yorkshirewoman Bentley brings off a considerable literary feat by exploring her region in time: the first story is set in 1350, the last in 1950. Place names echo and re-echo--Annotsfield, Whindale, the Ire Valley--as do the names of people: Brigg, Egmont, Resmond. Novelist Bentley succeeds in showing, as she sets out to do, that Yorkshire's West Ridinghood is persistent in the character of the tykes --whether they wield bows, shuttles or hymnbooks.

More Than Romance. Two stories illustrate the methods Author Bentley uses in all seven. In Revenge Upon Revenge, she sets three young men on a bloody course of vengeance in obedience to the private laws of a medieval feud between great families. The somberest of these gallants falls to the King's men when his mistress cuts his bowstring. The story seems like mere costume drama until it is read beside A Case of Conscience, in which the stone-faced chapel puritans of mid-Victorian times re-enact a similar feud--this time in terms of a squalid yet somehow splendid squabble over the theology and the bricks and mortar of the Resmond Street Independent Church.

Alderman Brigg and the new minister (suspect because he comes from the frivolous South) fight it out on the hard Calvinist line. The new man wavers on "those harsh and narrow dogmas," and the feud with Brigg is on. In the end the minister lies mysteriously dead, the peace of families has been ruined, the chapel is tern down, and a new congregation-with a softer creed has risen--and only then the reader notices that he has seen a picture of the inner life of nonconformist 19th century England.

More Than Money. Author Bentley writes in a spare, harsh style. But at her best she is as clear-spoken as Trollope, as sharp-eyed as Balzac, when it comes to the main theme of most lives: love and money--both, of course, in their proper place. She has the disarming habit of reviewing her own stories by telling the reader what he ought to think about them. Of A Case of Conscience she says: "The inhabitants of Annotsfield . . . are often supposed by those outside the town to be complete materialists, narrow-minded, uncultured, coarse, interested only in cloth, 'brass' [i.e., money] and possibly football. That this is a mistake, that they are capable of violent and protracted passion for an abstract idea, is sufficiently proved, I think, by the events above recorded."

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