Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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New England stories (Meadow-Grass), English travels (By Oak and Thorn), poems (The Road to Castaly), a study of Stevenson written in collaboration, stories for girls (as The Secret of the Clan), a play that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (Children of Earth) and a number of novels of which The Prisoner is the most notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature.

She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play—the play that captured Winthrop Ames’s prize—which was splendidly imaginative and even rather poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can make up for that lack.