y more
than a child with large, delightful eyes, she began to write, and
completed at the age of seventeen a novel which Andrew Lang advised an
English publisher to accept. Thereafter she wrote regularly and with
increasing distinction. Ill-health drove her to Switzerland where, living
for some years, she met all kinds of people from all the countries of
Europe and America as well.

It is interesting that her father was an American, although after his
marriage to an Englishwoman, he settled in England. Later Mr. Bottome came
to America and for six years during Phyllis Bottome's childhood he was
rector of Grace Church at Jamaica, New York. Phyllis Bottome is the wife
of A. E. Forbes Dennis, who, recovering from dangerous wounds in the war,
has been serving as passport officer at Vienna. They were married in 1917.
Those who know Phyllis Bottome personally say that the striking thing
about her is the extent of her acquaintance with people of all sorts and
conditions of life and her ready and unfailing sympathy with all kinds of
people. She herself says that she "has had friends who live humdrum and
simple lives and friends whose stories would bring a rush of doubt to the
most credulous believer in fiction." "My friendships have included
workmen, bargees, actresses, clergymen, thieves, scholars, dancers,
soldiers, sailors and even the manager of a bank. It would be true of me
to say that as a human being I prefer life to art, even if it would at the
same time be damning to admit that I know much more about it. I have no
preferences; men, women, children, animals and nature under every aspect
seem to me a mere choice of miracles. I have not perhaps many illusions,
but I have got hold of one or two certainties. I believe in life and I
know that it is very hard."

The hardness of life, its uproar, its agony, its magnificence and its
duty, is the theme of Phyllis Bottome's latest and finest novel. When it
was published, because it was so different from Phyllis Bottome's earlier
work, I tried to draw attention to it by a letter in which I said:

"I don't know whether you read J. C. Snaith's _The Sailor_. People said
Snaith got his suggestion from the life of John Masefield. _The Sailor_
sold many thousands and people recall the book today, years afterward.
But, as an ex-sailor and a few other things, I never found Snaith's 'Enry
'Arper half so convincing as Jim Barton in Phyllis Bottome's new novel,
_The Kingfisher_.

"Jim,