There appear now and then for most people – for nearly all people who are of a seriously bookish turn of mind – a book and then an author who change, who render more satisfactory, the whole citadel of books. I remember very well my feelings with the first words of Conrad’s that I ever read. They were, I think, ‘It has set at last!’ And immediately the world seemed to grow larger. That was the aspect it had for me. For the world of letters is a world, a territory, and when a new writer appears, and appears to be trustworthy, certain to go on, an actual region is available over which your mind may for ever travel. As if a new province had added itself to the globe. So it has been for me, at least, ever since. I have come across a great many new writers since Conrad corrected his first proof sheets and I have seldom had to change my mind about them after the first two or three words. And though, alas, many of those writers once new are now dead, their words remain. Just before I sat down to write this I was reading in A Shepherd’s Life the passage about the ploughman’s lad who ran down a great stretch of downs just to see Hudson pass. And just before that a passage about syrens by Norman Douglas, which was, I think, the first essay of his to be published and which I printed in The English Review. And both struck me as exquisitely beautiful passages and I was as glad of them as when I first read them. So my world has grown far larger than it was in, say, 1895.

But never between the first words of Conrad’s and the first of The Time of Man has so extraordinary and so great an enlargement taken place for me – and My Heart and My Flesh has enormously enhanced that growth of space. In the case of Miss Roberts as was formerly the case with the author of Almayer, it is not so much that a new writer or two new books of singular skill in workmanship had made their appearance, it is as if a whole quality had been added to literature itself – as if literature itself had a new purpose given to it, as if what literature could do had been extended in its scope, as if the number of emotions that literature could convey had been added to, and as if the permanent change that every book must work upon you had been given a new region in which to exercise itself. Of course, to read the book of any new author is to make the acquaintance of a new character, but the quality of each author’s isolation is very various, most authors coming out to fall in the ranks in a place fairly obviously awaiting them. Thus to read Mr Joyce for the first time is to see him almost without predecessors, whereas Mr Galsworthy, say, has added a very honourable column to the honourable façade of the British novel.

And for me Miss Roberts stands almost supremely alone. I am fairly acquainted – I daresay that I am better acquainted than most people – with the very striking literature that, since the war, the Middle West of the United States has presented to us. But although that tide of books is autochthonous enough and as redolent of its soil as any regional literature could possibly be, it is to be remembered that Miss Roberts is not a Middle Western writer, but a Southerner. She is, in fact, almost the only writer that the South has given the world. For it is a curious fact that though for long European traditions of formality in manners and a quite astonishing acquaintance with the humaner letters of classical tradition distinguished the Southern populations from the North, and then the Middle West and the West, hardly any writer of any considerable mark was ever born south of the Mason-Dixie [sic] line. Or, at any rate, that region of suavities, gallantries and refinements completely lacked a literature which could by any stretch of the imagination be called regional to the South.

Nor have the writings of Miss Roberts any kinship with the work of the Middle Westerners. They are never restless, hurried, broken up – or even, I am tempted to say, arresting. They hold you rather with the sort of possession of you that will be taken by the English lyric writers of the seventeenth century. Reading her is a little like reading Herbert or Donne. Mr Glenway Westcott, who like Miss Roberts was for a time educated in Chicago, has something of the quality, but he is so essentially a poet, whereas Miss Roberts is so essentially a novelist, that a comparison between their works is rather profitless. And all the other Middle Western writers, so many of whom passed together through Chicago University, are completely different, so that I have been tempted to say that if the Middle Westerners are indeed Americans then Miss Roberts is European. Certainly if you consider the faces that seem to look up from their pages as you read them, that of, say, Mr Ernest Hemingway is so extravagantly dissimilar from that of Miss Roberts that, by sheer reaction, you are driven to thinking of Jane Austen.

So Miss Roberts stands solitary. She does in truth a little resemble Jane Austen; if you read them one after the other in the same frame of mind, you will feel a somewhat similar tempo in the unfolding of their stories. They are, in fact, both English ladies – but Miss Roberts’s farms are so different, so infinitely, infinitely poorer that the resemblance has to be sought for.

The American Press, whose intelligence goes far, but not quite all the way, received The Time of Man with paeans of praise that did it infinite credit, and I believe that even our own reviewers were a little aroused from their lethargy by the earlier book. But the American Press could not quite rise as far as My Heart and My Flesh. Nevertheless, the time for that will come, for the latter book is of infinitely greater significance and of cohesion. The Time of Man was, in effect, a string of human anecdotes written with extreme beauty, not so much in the matter of writing as in the handling of episode after episode. My Heart and My Flesh is written with no less beauty and, indeed, with no less anecdotal luxuriance, but it has an architecture, a building up of effect that was wanting in the earlier book. So that gradually as the psychological choses données arrive, are developed and numbered, the mental pressure becomes almost insupportable. I have never in my life read anything that so immensely held me, that so interfered with my own life, as the later hunger-passages of this tremendous book. I know nothing like it in literature and I have never heard of anything that resembled it in life. That is what I mean when I say that a book may enlarge the sphere in which your mind may work. I shall never after this think of heavy toil, sparse living and starvation as I used to think of them in their effects on human psychology. One has been added to.

After that I had better myself add that Miss Roberts is no relation of my own: nepotism has no share in my admiration.