WOMEN AS NOVELISTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 80, 1 October 1938, Page 27

WOMEN AS NOVELISTS

In a survey of the twentieth-century period in literature,' contributed to the revised edition of Chambers's "Cyclopaedia of English Literature, Volume III" (just published), Dr. J. C. Smith makes the claim that fiction would have wilted but for" the genius of women. He gives special prominence to Miss Dorothy Richardson (who began to experiment with; the now unpopular "Stream of Consciousness" method as far back as 1915). Mrs. Virginia Woolf ("of all British experimenters the subtlest and boldest"), and Miss Dorothy Sayers (whose "Busman's Honeymoon" he sees as a return to the Dickensian formula of a love story with detective interruptions). Well, we shall all admit that women have helped greatly to develop the art of prose fiction since the war, but it is perhaps overstating the case to maintain —as Dr. Smith does —that they have much more than held their own with men. "In Edwardian days," he writes, "it would have been impossible to name six women novelists to compare with De Morgan, Conrad. Kipling, Bennett, Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. Today one could name a dozen whom the men would find it hard to match." Certainly the time is past when men could write disparagingly of "our lady novelists" —a sneer that was never really justified. For various reasons, partly economic, partly social, the woman novelist has ceased to be an

amateur