[Gutenberg 14614] • Sister Teresa

My publisher had given way too easily, and my artistic conscience forthwith began to trouble me, and has never ceased troubling me since that fatal day. The book the publisher puts asunder the author may not bring together, and I shall write to no purpose in one preface that "Evelyn Innes" is not a prelude to "Sister Teresa" and in another that "Sister Teresa" is not a sequel to "Evelyn Innes." Nor will any statement of mine made here or elsewhere convince the editors of newspapers and reviews to whom this book will be sent for criticism that it is not a revised edition of a book written ten years ago, but an entirely new book written within the last eighteen months; the title will deceive them, and my new book will be thrown aside or given to a critic with instructions that he may notice it in ten or a dozen lines. Nor will the fact that "Evelyn Innes" occupies a unique place in English literature cause them to order that the book shall be reread and reconsidered--a unique place I hasten to add which it may easily lose to-morrow, for the claim made for it is not one of merit, but of kind.

"Evelyn Innes" is a love story, the first written in English for three hundred years, and the only one we have in prose narrative. For this assertion not to seem ridiculous it must be remembered that a love story is not one in which love is used as an ingredient; if that were so nearly all novels would be love stories; even Scott's historical novels could not be excluded. In the true love story love is the exclusive theme; and perhaps the reason why love stories are so rare in literature is because the difficulty of maintaining the interest is so great; probably those in existence were written without intention to write love stories. Mine certainly was. The manuscript of this book was among the printers before it broke on me one evening as I hung over the fire that what I had written was a true love story about a man and a woman who meet to love each other, who are separated for material or spiritual reasons, and who at the end of the story are united in death or affection, no matter which, the essential is that they should be united. My story only varies from the classical formula in this, that the passion of "the lovely twain" is differentiated.

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