tions of slavery. But we know that always and
everywhere the opposition such thought arouses is sublimely lacking in
truth.

Here is a woman who cries out with magnificent impressive sincerity
against the fallacy of the maternal instinct--the "call of the
blood"--against the exclusiveness of love; who knows and asserts that
death kills only the dead, and not those who are left behind; who
recreates in new forms the law and the creed of the relations between
man and woman, motherhood, and suffering. And this new expression of
woman--a new expression, therefore, of the whole of life--this striking
gospel, young and strong, which overcomes artificial, unnatural ideas,
resounds at the very time when woman is at last entering humanity and is
preparing to change her role of breeder of children and handmaid in
common.

The book is strictly, religiously objective. Everything is perceived
only through the eyes, the mind, the heart of the "heroine"--the word
usage thrusts upon us for this woman who has no name, who is just truly
herself. Through the commanding will of the author the creative richness
of the book springs altogether from the magnificent oneness of a human
being. No outside approach mars this unity. In no other book perhaps so
markedly as in this has the integrity of an individual been more
respected, and never has an imaginary character so consistently warded
off whatever is not of itself. You don't even seem to feel that this
"Woman" talks or tells a story. You simply know what she knows.

And because of this very fact, this intimate association which unites us
jealously with this one being of all others, the book is poignant and
moving. A world is born beneath our eyes. In some scenes, short or long
but always important and vital, a tragedy shudders, and the entire
succession of the events of life, ordinary and on a big scale, passes in
the book in clear outline, in essential poetry.

* * * * *

To say this is to say that the author is a master, that her technique is
subtle, that the action concentrates all the dramas of the world in one
spiritual drama, and the book reveals a prodigious gift for presenting a
whole of vast impressions which creates unity.

_Woman_ does not belong to any class of writing; it is not tied down by
any formula; it does not lower itself by imitating. It is a powerful, a
rebel, a virgin work, and it ranks Magdeleine Marx among the loftiest
poets of