Download or read book I Have Only Myself to Blame written by Elizabeth Bibesco and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-02-21 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WE TRUST we are not laying ourself open to misconception when we describe Margot Asquith's daughter, the Princess A. Bibesco, as a chip off the old block for so we gather from a perusal of her volume of stories called "I Have Only Myself to Blame." Mamma Margot, you will recall, recently threw all the small town spinsters into a flurry of haste to get her shocking memoirs from the public Library. We notice it is still one of the six "non-fiction" books most in demand. (We were never quite certain about classing it as "non-fiction.") Now follows the daughter, who is the wife of the Roumanian Minister to these United States, with a collection of tales that other daughters should not permit their mothers to read without first explaining Things to them, for mothers are usually ignorant of the Facts of Life; and that the virginal sparrows who hop so eagerly over the lintels of New England public libraries looking for intellectual crumbs will probably read with delicious horror and profound misunderstanding. For these sketches-they are hardly stories in the true sense, but fleeting episodes, hints, suggestions, out of the eternal drama of Sex-are as sophisticated as a Schnitzler play. Indeed, if Elizabeth Asquith could write a little better, she could easily create a female "Anatole"; she has the wit, the observation, and the world-weary preoccupation with sex, characteristic of an outworn aristocracy. Consider her heroine who is wooed tenderly, amid the iris blooms, with reverent kisses on the hands, while she dreams of a roughneck behind a long cigar, who takes her masterfully up to a hotel bedroom with a brass bed. Or consider the wife at the end of the first year, who-but perhaps we needn't consider her just now. There will be plenty of readers who will consider her with a smirk or a leer. But that is not the way. Actually, there is something profoundly pathetic about this book, pathetic because its erotic note is so psychologically true, its "nerves" so real. It shows the point to which Mr. Shaw's "Horseback Hall" had sunk, in its old-world ease of privilege and sophistication. Read this book, and then read Hamlin Garland's "Daughter of the Middle Border," and you will learn more about the difference between Europe and America than a year of travel could teach you. -The Judge, Vol. 82 [1922]