erself
to 'commit melodrama.' In _Isle of Thorns_ her heroine, Sally Odiarne,
so describes her attempt to murder her lover, and I like to think of
Sheila Kaye-Smith's will leashing the passion that strains. I like even
more to think of the same will giving rein to anger, of a converse cry:
'Commit melodrama! I jolly well shall! I'm justabout sick of things!'

'Justabout!' That word, free-scattered in the speech of her rustics, is
all Sussex. For Sheila Kaye-Smith has given expression to the county
that from the Weald spreads green-breasted to meet the green sea. In all
the novels is the slow Sussex speech, dotted with the kindly 'surelye,'
the superlative 'unaccountable'; women are 'praaper,' ladies 'valiant,'
troubles 'tedious.' It has colour, it is true English, unstained of
Cockneyism and American. It is the speech of the oasthouse, of the
cottage on the marsh, of the forester's hut in Udimore Wood, where sings
the lark and rivulets flow like needles through the moss.

_Assez de litterature!_ Sheila Kaye-Smith is not a painter, even though
with dew diamonds the thorn-bush she spangle. Her Sussex is male: it is
not the dessicated Sussex of the modern novelist, but the Sussex of the
smuggler, of the Methodist, the squire; the Sussex where men sweat, and
read no books. Old Sussex, and the Sussex of to-day which some think was
created by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, she loves them both, and in both has
found consolation, but I think she loves best the old. It was old Sussex
made her first novel, _The Tramping Methodist_. Old Sussex bred its
hero, Humphrey Lyte. He was a picaresque hero, the young rebel, for he
grew enmeshed in murder and in love, in the toils of what England called
justice in days when the Regent went to Brighton. But Lyte does not
reveal Sheila Kaye-Smith as does _Starbrace_. Here is the apologia for
the rebel: Starbrace, the son of a poor and disgraced man, will not eat
the bread of slavery at his grandfather's price. You will imagine the
old man confronted with this boy, of gentle blood but brought up as a
labourer's son, hot, unruly, lusting for the freedom of the wet earth.
Starbrace is a fool; disobedient he is to be flogged. He escapes among
the smugglers on Winchelsea marsh, to the wild world of the
mid-eighteenth century. It is a world of fighting, and of riding, of
blood, of excisemen, of the 'rum pads' and their mistresses, their
dicing and their death. Despite his beloved, Theodora Straightway, l