name one living American novelist to compare with any one of the first twenty in his English list I should point to this edition and ask him if he had read Ellen Glasgow.
Publishers, booksellers, and readers race along from season to season after the book of the week—so do reviewers. A contemporary novelist soon becomes inaccessible in his entirety. Whether his earlier books are on the way to oblivion or whether he is in purgatory on the way to becoming a standard author and a classic, one can only determine after research in the old bookshops. I have managed to assemble, and read, first editions of seven or eight of Miss Glasgow's sixteen books, including the badly named "The Voice of the People," of which the first half is extraordinarily delicious; "The Deliverance," 1904, a story of rising and falling families with an admirable piece of characterization in Maria; "The Wheel of Life," 1906, a study of several types of men in New York and their ideals, with one flame-like woman; "The Miller of Old Church," 1911, specially rich in humor; "Virginia," 1918, a striking account of the insufficiency of the sweet self-sacrificing Southern wife; "Life and Gabriella," 1916, a study of the woman who finds a fairly satisfactory second-best in business success; "One Man in His Time," 1922, a portrait of a Governor of Virginia who is a self-made man.
Every so often the critics start up a discussion as to what constitutes abiding value in a novel. Mr. Swinnerton, Mr. A. B. Walkley and sundry other controversialists were waging such a discussion last summer. At the point where I looked in upon it opinion tended strongly to the orthodox conclusion that a novel may lack almost all the virtues and yet live by
