THE MODERN WOMEN IN NOVELS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XX, Issue 2063, 6 January 1925, Page 6

THE MODERN WOMEN IN NOVELS.

MISREPRESENTATION EVIDENT. After reading half a dozen novels which have apepared with the autumn publishing season I am moved to make a strong protest against themisrepresentation of modern women in fiction. I know it is a serious misrepresentation. A little while ago I was asked by a Frenchman if all Englishwomen were hysterical, morbid, introspective, and disillusioned. "Of course they are not," I retorted. "But why should you think so?" "I have not visited England," he replied, "but I have read many English novels by modern writers. And I thought they were writing of modern Englishwomen." Our modern women novelists write cleverly of abnormal women. There are certain writers whose gifts for dissecting souls does not come fat short of genius. But they write always from the conviction that a normal woman must be dull, that a normal relationship between any two people is still more dull, and that a happy marriage is so hopelessly uninteresting that it should find no place in fiction. In every age there have been women, as well as men, with tortured, restless minds. But I resent the picture which is so often given in modern fiction of modern women. It is a distorted picture. It is intended to suggest that no unmated woman ever found happiness, and that no married woman ever found happiness in her own marriage. There is an unfilled field for a woman novelist who can write about ordinary women, about ordinary relationships, who can restrain her passion for being merely clever. It is the worship of cleverness which has produced the pathological school of fiction. And only when women writers have returned to the eternal simplicities will men find their works attractive or illuminating.