Edith Wharton (born in New York in 1862) began her literary career with short stories of the metropolitan society with which she had been familiar from birth: “The Greater Inclination” (1899), eight stories, “A Gift from the Grave” (1900), and “Crucial Instances” (1901). In “The Valley of Decision” (1902), “Sanctuary” (1903), and “The House of Mirth” (1905), she deals with scenes and characters of deep human interest but not easily managed; and she acquits herself with credit. Lily Bart is distinctly individualised and is worthy to be compared with Becky Sharp and Gwendolen Harleth.
Upton Sinclair (born in Baltimore, 1878), after writing a number of novels, produced in “Manassas” (1904) a thrilling romantic novel of the years just preceding the Civil War. “The Jungle” (1906), though much better known, is artistically far inferior to it. The creed of socialism is professed by both Mr. Sinclair and Jack London (born in San Francisco in 1876). London left the University of California to go to the Klondike, afterward went to Japan, and has since tramped through America and Canada for sociological study. In his best works, “The Son of the Wolf” (1900), “The Call of the Wild” (1903), and “The Sea Wolf” (1904), he has chosen to depict the tragedies of the animal world and the elemental passions in man.
Three Virginia women novelists have won distinction in recent years.
Molly Elliot Seawell (born in Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1860), a resident of Washington, began writing fiction in 1886. Among her stories are “Throckmorton” (1890), “Little Jarvis” (1890), a Youth’s Companion prize story, “Midshipman Paulding” (1891), “The Sprightly Romance of Marsac” (1896), a lively story that won a New York Herald prize of $3000, “The Lively Adventures of Gavin Hamilton” (1899), “The House of Egremont” (1901), “Children of Destiny” (1903), and “The Great Scoop” (1905). Her plots are sometimes slight and inconsequential, and her narrative lacks reserve; but she shows skill in the management of dialogue, and is a favourite writer.
Ellen Glasgow (born in Richmond in 1874) has found many readers with her “Descendant” (1897), “Phases of an Inferior Planet” (1898), “The Voice of the People” (1900), “The Battle-Ground” (1902), and “The Deliverance” (1904). She does not manage to escape from improbabilities, and some of her plots are desultory; yet on the whole her work maintains a high average.
Mary Johnston (born at Buchanan, Virginia, in 1870) has realised the possibilities of early Virginia history in her successful romances, “Prisoners of Hope” (1898), published in England as “The Old Dominion,” “To Have and to Hold” (1900), in England called “By Order of the Company,” “Audrey” (1902), and “Sir Mortimer” (1904). She has a sure touch, and her narrative moves rapidly.
But we have already exceeded the limits of our space. The work of Margaret Sherwood, William A. White, Brand Whitlock, Will Payne, Meredith Nicholson, George Barr McCutcheon, Jesse Lynch Williams, David Graham Phillips, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, James B. Connolly, Nelson Lloyd, George Cary Eggleston, William N. Harben, Justus Miles Forman, and many others, excellent as much of it is, can only be referred to summarily. The great number of promising writers of to-day is a matter of congratulation.
Retrospect and Conclusion.—We have thus traced the American novel from its first crude beginnings through a little more than a century of healthy and constant growth. It took the American novelist some three or four decades to learn to stand on his own feet; since he has learned to walk he has required very little assistance from abroad. More and more the possibilities of American life have attracted the writers of prose fiction. In the earlier decades of the last century, as was the case in Europe, the romance was the only fiction in demand; and the romance has ever been the favourite of many readers who maintain that the chief function of literature is to give reality through the alembic of the imagination. Perhaps the creed of romanticism has never been better put than by Mr. Julian Hawthorne:
The value of fiction lies in the fact that it can give us what actual existence cannot; that it can resume in a chapter the conclusions of a lifetime; that it can omit the trivial, the vague, the redundant, and select the significant, the forcible, and the characteristic; that it can satisfy expectation, expose error, and vindicate human nature. Life, as we experience it, is too vast, its relations are too complicated, its orbit too comprehensive, ever to give us the impression of individual completeness and justice; but the intuition of these things, though denied to sense, is granted to faith, and we are authorised to embody that interior conviction in romance.... And stories of imagination are truer than transcripts of fact, because they include or postulate these, and give a picture not only of the earth beneath our feet, but of the sky above us, of the hope and freshness of the morning, of the mystery and magic of the night. They draw the complete circle, instead of mistrustfully confining themselves to the lower arc.[20]
Notwithstanding the attractiveness of this artistic creed, the ranks of the out-and-out romancers have gradually thinned, as we have seen. Professor Boyesen believed that Bret Harte was the last of these. Slowly the realists, led by Howells and James, have gained ground, and for the last twenty years have almost steadily held the field. Of late, indeed, there have been some signs of a reaction; but it has as yet taken no very pronounced form.