Mrs Belloc-Lowndes, and Mrs Dudeney, must take their chance in the rough
and tumble of literary criticism, and the writer does not suggest a
comparison between them and the leading men. For this there is a very
good reason: the young women of to-day are promising work of an entirely
new kind. They have less style than their precursors and more ideas:
such women writers as Miss Amber Reeves,[3] Miss Viola Meynell, Miss
Sheila Kaye-Smith,[4] Miss Tennyson Jesse, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss
Katherine Gerould, Miss Bridget MacLagan have produced so far, very
little; they can be indicated as candidates, but much more faintly than
their masculine rivals. They write less, and less easily; they are
younger at their trade, more erratic. It is enough to mention them, and
to say that, so far as women are showing indications of approximating to
men in literary quality, these are the women who are likely soon to
bear the standards of their sex.

[Footnote 3: See Special Chapter.]

[Footnote 4: _Ibid._]

To sum up, I suggest that the rough classification of the seven young
men must not be taken as fixed. Some are more autobiographic than
evocative; some are receptive rather than personally active, and yet
others have not chosen between the two roads. Yet, taking them as a
whole, with the reservation of possible dark horses, these are probably
the men among whom will be found the two or three who will 'somehow,' in
another ten years, lead English letters. It will be an indefinable
'somehow,' a compound of intellectual dominance and emotional sway. We
shall not have a Bennett for a Bennett, nor a Wells for a Wells, but
equivalents of power, and equivalents of significance, who will be
intimately in tune with their time and better than any will express it.

Three Young Novelists

1. MR D. H. LAWRENCE

It is not a very long time ago since Professor Osler startled America
and England by proclaiming that a man was too old at forty. This is not
generally held, though, I suppose, most of us will accept that one is
too old to begin at forty. But that is not the end: very soon, in
literature at least, it may be too late to begin at thirty, if we are to
take into account the achievements of the young men, of whom Mr D. H.
Lawrence is one of the youngest. Mr Lawrence is certainly one of the
young men, not a member of a school, for they have no formal school, and
can have none if they are of any value, but a partner in their
te