WAYWARD Girls and Wicked Women : the title of this collec-

tion is, of course, ironic. Very few of the women in these stories

are guilty of criminal acts, although all of them have spirit and

one or two of them, to my mind, are, or have the potential to be,

really evil. The horrid adolescent in Katherine Mansfield s The

Young Girl , for example, selfish, vain, rude to her mother,

uncivil to strangers, beastly to her little brother. (Though Kath-

erine Mansfield herself, who was an adventuress in a mild way

and boasted the reputation of a wayward girl in her own life-

time, emerges here as narrator as a woman of such transparent

good faith that small boys instinctively trust her to stand them

expensive ice-creams.)

Most of the variously characterized girls and women who

inhabit these stories, however, would seem much, much worse if

men had invented them. They would be predatory, drunken

hags; confidence tricksters; monstrously precocious children;

liars and cheats; promiscuous heartbreakers. As it is, they are all

presented as if they were perfectly normal. On the whole,

women writers are kind to women.

Perhaps too kind. Women, it is true, commit far fewer crimes

than men in the first place; we do not have the same oppor-

tumties to do so. But, from the evidence of the fiction we write,

we find it very hard to blame ourselves even for those we do

commit. We tend to see the extenuating circumstances, so that it

is difficult to apportion blame, impossible to judge - or, indeed,

to acknowledge responsibility and then take up the terrible

burden of remorse as it is summed up in Samuel Beckett s phrase,

my crime is my punishment .

I cannot thirik of any woman in any work of fiction written by

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