Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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As a novelist Miss Brown can be absolutely unreadable. If you don’t believe that try to go through My Love and I, first published under the pen name “Martin Redfield.” It is Stevenson with the Scotch left out. Again, she can write a book like The Prisoner, which is as fine in its way as anything John Galsworthy ever did. In its way? Nothing derogatory, we assure you! The way is American, not English; that’s all (as Miss Brown would say).

It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice Brown to her novels; but this disadvantage to her is no greater than the disadvantage to Edna Ferber or one or two others whose best work is not in the novel form. Since the restriction does Miss Brown, on the whole, a considerable injustice, let us restrict a little further and consider only her best novel. We shall then be doing as much as we can to redress the balance in her favor and perhaps more than we ought to do. But chivalry is not dead.