He is fond of the country, and of golf and all kinds of sports; he is an equally keen theater-goer, but gets more enjoyment out of writing stories than out of anything else, and since he draws more inspiration for these from the town than from the country, he is never happier than when he is in town. “The cities for me!” he said to an interviewer. “Half a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants, the people one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.” He wrote “Mr. Laxworthy’s Adventures” while he was staying at a hotel in Paris; but though Paris and New York attract him, London is his spiritual home and, with its endless streets and motley crowds, is the chief begetter of his sensational romances.
Yet his appearance is less suggestive of the city than of rural life. Ruddy, genial, smiling, with his sturdy figure and bluff manner, it is easier to fancy him, in gaiters, carrying a riding whip, as a typical country squire, than as a brilliant imaginative author creating fictitious villains and preoccupied with dreams of strange crimes and the mysterious doings of lawless and desperate men. Which is to say only that he no more gives himself away to the casual observer than he gives away the secret of any of his plots in the first chapter of the book.
MAY SINCLAIR
May Sinclair
In a rash moment, recently, Michael Sadleir committed himself to the retrospective and prophetic assertion that there never had been a great woman novelist and never would be. The first part of that statement is, of course, open to argument; the second cannot be proved. If he had said the greatest novelists, so far, have been men, he would have been on safe ground; for I don’t think even the most politely complaisant master of the ceremonies would suggest that Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray should step back and allow Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot to lead this particular procession of the immortals. Which is not to say that these last are not great, but only that there have been greater.
Turning to living authors, if, so far as this country is concerned (and here we are not concerned with any other), the same order of precedence still obtains, the distance between the men in the first rank and the women in the second has, at least, sensibly diminished. Leaving Hardy apart in his incontestible supremacy, have we any novelists alive who are, on the whole, superior to Wells, Conrad, Bennett, Galsworthy? It is a question Time alone can decide with certainty, but fallible men must needs, meanwhile, make up their separate minds as best they can, and, for my part, I would answer in the negative. But should any one claim that there are four women novelists who, if they do not surpass, are equal in achievement with the four men I have named, I could not begin to deny it until I had read them all over again. So nice, so delicate a matter is not to be settled off-hand. Even such godlike judges as Gosse and Squire might well lay aside their thunder and lightning in face of it and be disposed to temporize.
For, relegating to outer darkness (where many of us would be willing to join them) all whose glory is nothing but a vast popularity and its accessories—think what a galaxy of women novelists there are and what sound and notable work the best of them have done. Of course who have been longest before the public, you have Lucas Malet, Sarah Grand, George Colmore, Mary Cholmondeley, Mary and Jane Findlater, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mary E. Mann; of those who began somewhat later, Elinor Mordaunt, Dolf Wyllarde, Violet Hunt, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, M. P. Willcocks, Peggy Webling, Mrs. Dawson Scott, Beatrice Harraden, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Phillis Bottome, Rose Macaulay, May Sinclair, Sheila Kaye-Smith; and of a still later day, Viola Meynell, Ethel Sidgwick, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Mary Webb, Clemence Dane, Rebecca West, G. B. Stern, Storm Jameson, M. Leonora Eyles, Stella Benson.... This by no means completes the list, and there is no reason for ending it here except that it is long enough and contains a sufficient number of names for whomsoever will to select from it four whose work may fairly challenge comparison with the greatest that has been done by contemporary novelists of the other sex.
Any adequate survey of the modern English novel would, at all events, have to take into account most of the women writers I have mentioned, but for my present less ambitious occasions I am contented to limit my record to two—May Sinclair and Sheila Kaye-Smith—whom I take to be generally representative of such of them as are still in the full tide of their careers: the latter as having acquaintance with the larger variety of human character and giving breadth, color and fullness of life to her stories out of a wider, robuster interest in the multifarious affairs that absorb so much of the thought and activities of men; the former as being the subtler artist both in psychology and style.
As long ago as 1916, the distinguished American critic, Dr. Lyon Phelps, described Miss Sinclair as “to-day the foremost living writer among English-speaking women.” He rightly dated her rise to this eminence from the publication of “The Divine Fire,” in 1904, and as rightly reminded us that “the British audience for whom it was intended paid no attention to it” till it had been acclaimed by critics and read with enthusiasm by thousands of readers in America. Why Miss Sinclair had to wait eight years for that recognition I cannot explain. She adventured into literature in orthodox fashion by publishing two volumes of verse early in the ’nineties. Her first novel, “Audrey Craven,” appeared in 1896. Then came, with longish intervals between, “Mr. and Mrs. Nevil Tyson” and “Two Sides of a Question.” These three books were touched with something of the grey realism that prevented Gissing from becoming popular with a public which, then more than now, disliked novels of that hue and preferred its fiction to be either elevating or pleasantly entertaining. But if there was no run on these three books at the libraries, they did not pass, unless my memory misleads me, without due meed of praise from the more discriminating reviews; and, as Miss Sinclair has done far finer work since “The Divine Fire,” so I think she did truer, finer work before that in, at least, the second of her three earlier volumes. It were harder to say why the laurels fell upon the fourth than why they missed the second.