better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more
dominant in her social relations, that any form of literature
truthfully mirroring the society of the modern world must regard
her as of potent efficiency. And this is so quite apart from the
consideration that women make up to-day the novelist's largest
audience, and that, moreover, the woman writer of fiction is in
numbers and popularity a rival of men.

It would scarcely be too much to see a unifying principle in the
evolution of the modern Novel, in the fact that the first
example in the literature was Pamela, the study of a woman,
while in representative latter-day studies like "Tess of the
D'Urbervilles," "The House of Mirth," "Trilby" and "The Testing
of Diana Mallory" we again have studies of women; the purpose
alike in time past or present being to fix the attention upon a
human being whose fate is sensitively, subtly operative for good
or ill upon a society at large. It is no accident then, that
woman is so often the central figure of fiction: it means more
than that, love being the solar passion of the race, she
naturally is involved. Rather does it mean fiction's recognition
of her as the creature of the social biologist, exercising her
ancient function amidst all the changes and shifting ideas of
successive generations. Whatever her superficial changes under
the urge of the time-spirit, Woman, to a thoughtful eye, sits
like the Sphinx above the drifting sands, silent, secret,
powerful and obscure, bent only on her great purposive errand
whose end is the bringing forth of that Overman who shall rule
the world. With her immense biologic mission, seemingly at war
with her individual career, and destructive apparently of that
emancipation which is the present dream of her champions, what a