Books: Escapes Within Escape

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Author Norah Lofts is a pretty girl from Norfolk, England. In Colin Lowrie (Knopf, $2.50), she puts herself into the person of a handsome man from Crosslochie, Scotland, sets out with him to escape the Jacobite disorders of 1745, falls into slavery in the West Indies, escapes again to become a planter in Virginia, there lures a nun from a convent and is wooed by an aggressive woman. All this she does with spirit, conviction and excitement.

Miss Lofts goes out of her way to handicap her fifth novel. She prefaces it with an essay on style: "Style of writing," she says, "should be something of which the reader is supremely unconscious; it should be clear and neutral, like the glass of a shop window. And because one offers a study of people long dead is no reason why that glass should be the knobbly 'bottle' kind which hasty judgment might deem more seemly." Under close examination Miss Lofts's glass proves to be fairly clear plate, not too marred by fingerprints.