withdrawal into a
selected atmosphere implies that criticism of this atmosphere is
suspended. Nothing so swiftly as that kills virility in literature.

But even so Miss Amber Reeves distinguishes herself from her immediate
rivals, Miss Viola Meynell, Miss Bridget Maclagan, Miss Sheila
Kaye-Smith, Miss Katherine Gerould, by an interest in business and in
politics. She really knows what is a limited liability company or an
issue warrant. She is not restricted to love, but embraces such problems
as money, rank, science, class habits, which serve or destroy love. She
finds her way in the modern tangle where emotion and cupidity trundle
together on a dusty road. She is not always just, but she is usually
judicial. Her men are rather gross instead of strong; she likes them,
she tolerates them, they are altogether brutes and 'poor dears.' But
then we are most of us a little like that.

3. SHEILA KAYE-SMITH

I do not know whether this is a compliment, but I should not be
surprised if a reader of, say, _Starbrace_ or _Sussex Gorse_, were to
think that Sheila Kaye-Smith is the pen-name of a man. Just as one
suspects those racy tales of guardsmen, signed 'Joseph Brown' or 'George
Kerr,' of originating from some scented boudoir, so does one hesitate
before the virility, the cognisance of oath and beer, of rotating crop,
sweating horse, account book, vote and snickersnee that Sheila
Kaye-Smith exhibits in all her novels. This is broader, deeper than the
work of the women novelists of to-day, who, with the exception of Amber
Reeves, are confined in a circle of eternally compounding pallid or
purple loves. One side of her work, notably, surprises, and that is the
direction of her thoughts away from women, their great and little
griefs, towards men and the glory of their combat against fate. Sheila
Kaye-Smith is more than any of her rivals the true novelist: the showman
of life.

Yet she is a woman. You will imagine her as seeming small, but not so;
very thin, with a grace all made of quiescence, her eyes gray and
retracted a little, as if always in pain because man is not so beautiful
as the earth that bore him, because he fails in idealism, falls away
from his hopes and cannot march but only shamble from one eternity into
another. There is in her a sort of cosmic choler restrained by a Keltic
pride that is ready to pretend a world made up of rates and taxes and
the 9.2 train to London Bridge. Afire within, she will not allow h