Then came Miss Lulu Bett, read with the enthusiasm of discovery by the publisher, who telegraphed his congratulations—a thing publishers infrequently do! Except in England, where its merit was quickly noted, Birth had not sold at all well. Six magazine editors had rejected Miss Lulu Bett as a serial. Happily, all signs failed. The crisply-told little novel of the household drudge and her fortunes went into one edition after another; a play from the novel was sought and Miss Gale fashioned it herself; the annual Pulitzer prize was awarded to the play. Whether the concision of style practised so effectively in Birth was not carried a bit too far in Miss Lulu Bett must always remain a matter of opinion. The most interesting point, I think, is the change of ending which the requirements of the theatre forced upon Miss Gale. As she observed, an audience in a playhouse could not reasonably be expected to swallow the spectacle of a woman marrying two men in the space of three hours, even though the indicated lapse of time was much longer than that; she therefore, to make the play, caused Miss Bett’s first marriage to turn out to be valid after all. In this matter Miss Gale was not guilty of “sweetening” her story, as has been charged. She simply was up against a limitation as definite as that which restricts the number of scenes possible in a play.
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And this year she has given us Faint Perfume, a study of a finely sensitive feminine personality stifling in the atmosphere of a quite usual sort of American family. Leda Perrin, forced to make her home with the Crumbs, is brought into a fleeting contact with Barnaby Powers, a writer with a temperament of the same response. They meet, together face the defeat of their desire, and go separately apart. At the close there is the briefest possible second meeting and a hope is held out for their eventual happiness together. This theme, of the utmost delicacy, is the occasion for a considerable display of virtuosity by Miss Gale. By means of deft and distinct individualisation of her characters—each Crumb, for instance, standing out as a complete fiery particle—she orchestrates the melodic fragment of Leda and Barnaby in a sort of free treatment (but with careful working out), as a composer might do in setting a quartette for strings. May this musical simile be helpful! The clipped style of Miss Lulu Bett is here carried a step further, until Miss Gale almost seems to out-Sinclair Miss May Sinclair. The style has been called precious, which is the technical word for what the ordinary person calls “affected”; and, on the other hand, one able critic has declared that it is not the style that is precious but Miss Gale’s material. One thing is certain, the treatment is as far removed as possible from the literalness of such a novel as Main Street, and this is natural to expect when we remember that Miss Gale is, after all and perhaps fundamentally, a poet. Her poems published in book form are to a great extent inferior to her best poems, which, so far as I know, still repose in some old files of the Smart Set magazine.
The point, however, is not the merit or demerit of Faint Perfume, nor the relative values of Miss Gale’s three books here discussed. The point is Zona Gale, her undeniable artistry, her literary maturity and her manifest power ... and the importance of her work to come.
Books by Zona Gale
1906 Romance Island
1907 The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre
1908 Friendship Village
1909 Friendship Village Love Stories
1911 Mothers to Men
1912 Christmas
1913 When I Was a Little Girl
1914 Neighborhood Stories
1915 Heart’s Kindred
1917 A Daughter of Tomorrow
1918 Birth
1919 Peace in Friendship Village
1920 Miss Lulu Bett
1920 Neighbors (play)
1921 Miss Lulu Bett (play)
1923 Faint Perfume
Sources on Zona Gale
The Women Who Make Our Novels (second or third edition, 1919 or 1922). MOFFAT YARD & COMPANY.
The Literary Spotlight, XVIII: Zona Gale, in THE BOOKMAN for April, 1923. This article now forms a chapter in the book, The Literary Spotlight, with an introduction by John Farrar.
Zona Gale, An Artist in Fiction, by WILSON FOLLETT. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company.