* * * * *

I wish to add a few lines in order to record here an impression which I
experienced while reading the very first pages of _The Dangerous Age_;
an impression that became deeper and clearer when I had closed the book.

_The Dangerous Age_ is one of those rare novels by a woman in which the
writer has not troubled to think from a man's point of view. I lay
stress upon this peculiarity because it is _very rare_, especially among
the contemporary works of Frenchwomen.

The majority of our French authoresses give us novels in which their
ambition to think, to construct and to write in a masculine style is
clearly perceptible. And nothing, I imagine, gives them greater pleasure
than when, thanks to their pseudonyms, their readers actually take them
for men writers.

Therefore all this mass of feminine literature in France, with three or
four exceptions--all this mass of literature of which I am far from
denying the merits--has really told us nothing new about the soul of
woman. A strange result is that not a single woman writer of the present
day is known as a specialist in feminine psychology.

Karin Michaëlis has been inspired to write a study of womankind without
trying to interpose between her thought and the paper the mind and
vision of a man. The outcome is astonishing. I have said that the
construction of the novel is solid; but no man could have built it up in
that way. It moves to a definite goal by a sure path; yet its style is
variable like the ways of every woman, even if she be completely