necessary personal independence. This is the attitude
expressed in Richard Blaker's novel, _The Voice in the Wilderness_. The
story centres around the figure of Charles Petrie, popular playwright in
London but known in Pelchester merely as a shabby fellow and to his family
a singularly sarcastic and annoying father. Sarcasm was Petrie's one
defence against the limp weight that was Mrs. Petrie His children would
have been astonished to hear him called a charming man of the world, yet
he was. It is probable that he never would have come out into the open to
combat if he hadn't been moved constantly to interfere and save his
daughter Cynthia from offering herself as a willing sacrifice to her
mother. Richard Blaker is new to America, a novelist of acutely pointed
characterisations and careful atmosphere.

=viii=

_Nene_, the work of an unknown French school teacher, a novel
distinguished in France by the award of the Goncourt Prize as the most
distinguished French novel of the year 1920, had sold at this writing
400,000 copies in France. Three months after publication, it had sold in
this country less than 3,000 copies.

I am glad to say that it was sufficient to draw to the attention of
Americans this deplorable discrepancy to arouse interest in the novel.
People of so divergent tastes as William Lyon Phelps, Corra Harris, Ralph
Connor, Walter Prichard Eaton, Mary Johnston, Dorothy Speare and Richard
LeGallienne have been at pains to express the feeling to which _Nene_ has
stirred them. I have not space to quote them all, and so select as typical
the comment of Walter Prichard Eaton:

"I read _Nene_ with great interest, especially because of its relation to
_Maria Chapdelaine_. It seems to me the two books came out most happily
together. _Maria Chapdelaine_ gives us the French peasant in the new
world, touched with the pioneer spirit, and though close to the soil in
constant battle with nature, somehow always master of his fate. _Nene_
gives us this same racial stock, again close to the soil, but an old-world
soil its fathers worked, and the peasant here seems ringed around with
those old ghosts, their prejudices and their passions. I have seldom read
any book which seemed to me so unerringly to capture the enveloping
atmosphere of place and tradition, as it conditions the lives of people,
and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly
that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh--