“Gloomily yours,
“Alice Brown.”
[In pencil]
“I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it pans out!”
And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier, may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people. Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will be found at the close of this chapter.
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.
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.
The Prisoner is the story of a relatively young man who has just come out of prison and whose readjustment to the world he is reëntering is a keenly interesting subject. The very first thing to be noted is the absolute originality and freshness of Miss Brown’s conception of her story. This, perhaps innocently, we believe to be without a literary parallel.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred novelists, in these days probably 999 out of 1,000, and of women novelists 9,999 out of 10,000, would see the released man in a single aspect. The victim of society, of course; prison reform, sociology, Thomas Mott Osborneism, uplift, the cruelty of the world in letting a man out after having once put him in (for it is much more of a punishment to release a man from jail than to incarcerate him), cruelty, wrong, cruelty, injustice, cruelty, the way of the world, cruelty——.