At the
start a price of $2,500 was put upon it, but after vainly inviting
buyers for a couple of months it was finally disposed of to a literary
newspaper which seldom spends so much as $2,500, I daresay, for a whole
month's supply of copy.
In the United States, at least, novelists are made and unmade, not by
critical majorities, but by women, male and female. The art of fiction
among us, as Henry James once said, "is almost exclusively feminine." In
the books of such a man as William Dean Howells it is difficult to find
a single line that is typically and exclusively masculine. One could
easily imagine Edith Wharton, or Mrs. Watts, or even Agnes Repplier,
writing all of them. When a first-rate novelist emerges from obscurity
it is almost always by some fortuitous plucking of the dexter string.
"Sister Carrie," for example, has made a belated commercial success, not
because its dignity as a human document is understood, but because it is
mistaken for a sad tale of amour, not unrelated to "The Woman Thou
Gavest Me" and "Dora Thorne.
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