THE LOST TRAVELLER

Reprints of two autobiographical novels by novelist/translator White (born 1899)--first in a series, imported from Britain, of feminist ""Virago Modern Classics."" White's novels, however, are as much about being a Catholic as being a woman--and Frost in May (1933) especially is very narrowly specific: life in an English convent school before the Great War. The Lost Traveller (1950) also begins with a convent-school background in the same period; but here the sexual politics are dealt with quite explicitly, as the heroine's mother announces: "". . . isn't it terrible that men can inflict such torment on us in the name of love? . . . And the Catholic Church backs them up. Of course it's run by men."" The Lost Traveller is, in fact, the first of a trilogy about lapsings in and out of Catholicism, and White's work is therefore limited by both its religious and period preoccupations. Still, feminists will find much to applaud, as will readers more interested in the implicit cross-references to wrestlings with Anglo-Catholicism by other writers, especially Evelyn Waugh. In any case, an interesting import-reissue--which will perhaps be unfairly pigeonholed by that ""Virago"" imprint.