FOOTNOTES:
[2] We need not mention a Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Milton. Perhaps these are too far back. Not so Tolstoi, Dostoyevski, Turgenev, Goethe, Heine, Balzac, Maupassant, the Goncourts, Flaubert, Byron, Browning, Shelley, Emerson, Walt Whitman. Where are their equals among women? And coming down to the modern period, when literature is flooded with feminine figures, is there one who can be placed beside Anatole France or d’Annunzio or Proust or Gorki or even Bernard Shaw (not to mention Ibsen)? The feminine names that might be cited in comparison are obvious enough, but would any of them measure up to these—quite? However, let me mention Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay. And I may add Sheila Kaye-Smith, Willa Cather, Selma Lagerlöf and Marguérite Audou.
I realize, of course, that such comparisons, except in a most sweeping statement, are invidious. A better picture could be obtained by juxtaposing, one to one, writers of similar type and literary form—but this is a task for a volume.