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MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR by Judith Kelly Kirkus Star

MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR

By

Pub Date: Aug. 20th, 1941
Publisher: Harper

The selection of this as the 1941 Harper Prize Novel insures a concentration of publicity, advertising and press comments. Add to that, the fact that (a) the reading public has been starved along the lines of modern stories without social significance (i.e. the underprivileged classes) and without war as a major premise; (b) that youth beyond first youth has long needed a sponsor, and John O'Hara isn't IT -- and you have a good set up for Marriage Is A Private Affair achieving an immediate success. It's not great literature, but the girl can write, she turns a neat phrase (in the school of Rose Franken and Isabel Rorick -- Claudia and the Cugats) -- and she has something to say. The book is essentially honest, essentially modern (without being fast). The people might be friends or acquaintances down the block; the incidents that nearly wreck what starts out as an ideally romantic marriage are incidents that may be found in most not too conservative circles. A psychological novel of marriage, a woman's book first, though by no means wholly; fulfillment of our own prophecy in 1936, in regard to her first novel, It Wont Be Flowers:- ""This author can write...watch her...