political conditions. Perhaps an impressionist novel, like Dorothy
Richardson's. Only they were getting common; they were too easy. One
could hardly help writing like that, unless one tried not to, if one had
lately read any of them.

Most contemporary novels Jane found very bad, not worth writing. Those
solemn and childish novels about public schools, for instance, written by
young men. Jane wondered what a novel about Roedean or Wycombe Abbey
would be like. The queer thing was that some young woman didn't write
one; it need be no duller than the young men's. Rather duller, perhaps,
because schoolgirls were more childish than schoolboys, the problems of
their upbringing less portentous. But there were many of the same
ingredients--the exaltation of games, hero-worship, rows, the clever new
literary mistress who made all the stick-in-the-mud other mistresses
angry.... Only were the other mistresses at girls' schools
stick-in-the-mud? No, Jane thought not; quite a decent modern set, on the
whole, for people of their age. Better than schoolmasters, they must be.

How dull it all was! Some woman ought to do it, but not Jane.

Jane was inclined, in her present phase, to think the Russians and the
French the only novelists. They had manner and method. But they were both
too limited in their field, too much concerned with sexual relations,
that most tedious of topics (in literature, not life), the very thought
of which made one yawn. Queer thing, how novelists couldn't leave it
alone. It was, surely, like eating and drinking, a natural element in
life, which few avoid; but the most exciting, jolly, interesting,
entertaining things were apart from it. Not that Jane was not quite
willing to accept with approval, as part of the game of living, such
episodes in this field as came her way; but she could not regard them as