TILE ...CELEBRITY'S DAUGHTER, THE DOLL, THE LAST DITCH, THEIR HEARTS.
By Violet Hunt. (Stanley 3s. 6d. lief.)-7-These reprints of four of Miss Violet Hunt's novels bring; together, not before it was time, some oi'The a- very remarkable woman: novelist: Miss Hunt has been a pioneer, and like many forerunners has not had half her due credit. As cleverness goes, she is far ahead
of any of the women writers who have been influenced by her work. She is more shrewd and more subtle than Miss West, more true to experience and more vivid than Miss Sinclair,. more penetrating and dramatic than Miss Storm Jameson. -
One element, however, may account for her having achieved less popularity and, therefore, less esteem than might have been expected. There is a worldly-wise, rather uncharitable tinge to everything she writes. One feels she understands without liking the characters she brings so brilliantly to life. It is this, despite her ease in tale-telling, despite the con- viction her words carry, which antagonizes the larger public whose palate has been half-ruined with fiction that is less true but much sweeter. The air of impending calamity which overhangs all Miss Hunt's personae is, indeed, actually uncom- fortable. She takes a fairly simple, not unusual crisis in the sentimental affairs of some central figure in a wide circle, and exposes every reaction it causes on every one of the figures moving inside the circle. Her method has the reality of life, though only the very brave or the very sincere people care to admit the perpetual interweaving of each single destiny, almost each single action, with those of other people. But Miss Hunt does insist upon it ruthlessly ; she animates the dull sordid lines of an average divorce case with humanity and understanding. The Celebrity's Daughter leaVes unexposed no single motive underlying the- disparity of the heroine's actress mother and literary father ; to read it is emotional education of the best possible kind.
The Doll, which bears more traces than the rest of Miss Hunt's work of the influence of Henry James, is extremely; dramatic in construction and the characters ,as vital as. Sargent portraits. Here, again, the light of day is let in oil one of the thousand hidden domestic tragedies which seem to be the fate of especially sensitive or especially intelligenI people ; it reveals the authoress' feminism, even preaches a little, but with extreme sanity. The Last Ditch, one Of the most brilliant and disturbing novels of the last ten years, is a study of aristocracy and the War ; it has been imitated again and again, but never rivalled. It is safe to prophesy that when all the modern fiction has been weeded out by time, the novels of Miss Hunt will remain safely in their perhaps not very exalted place. But they will remain, a tribute to one of the rare writers who estimate the mentality of their age even before it is obvious. Miss-Hunt is still the most modern of our women novelists.
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