Project Gutenberg's The Third Miss Symons, by Flora Macdonald Mayor

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Title: The Third Miss Symons

Author: Flora Macdonald Mayor

Release Date: October 28, 2008 [EBook #27071]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE THIRD
MISS SYMONS

F. M. Mayor

_With a Preface by John Masefield_

First published in Great Britain 1913

Copyright F. M. Mayor 1913

PREFACE

Miss Mayor's story is of a delicate quality, not common here, though
occurring at intervals, and always sure of a choice, if not very large,
audience among those who like in art the refined movement and the gentle
line. Her subject, like her method, is one not commonly chosen by women
writers; it is simply the life of an unmarried idle woman of the last
generation, a life (to some eyes) of wasted leisure and deep futility,
but common enough, and getting from its permitted commonness a
justification from life, who is wasteful but roughly just. Miss Mayor
tells this story with singular skill, more by contrast than by drama,
bringing her chief character into relief against her world, as it passes
in swift procession. Her tale is in a form becoming common among our
best writers; it is compressed into a space about a third as long as the
ordinary novel, yet form and manner are so closely suited that all is
told and nothing seems slightly done, or worked with too rapid a hand.
Much that is tiresome in the modern novel, the pages of analysis and of
comment, the long descriptions and the nervous pathology, are omitted by
Miss Mayor's method, which is all for the swift movement and against the
temptations to delay which obstruct those whose eyes are not upon life;
she condenses her opportunities for psychology and platitude into a
couple of shrewd lines and goes on with her story, keeping her freshness
and the reader's interest unabated. The method is to draw the central
figure rapidly past a succession of bright lights, keeping the lights
various and of many colours and allowing