MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN. _A Humble Romance_, 1887; _A New England Nun_, 1891; _Young Lucretia_, 1892; _Jane Field_, 1892; _Giles Corey, Yeoman: a Play_, 1893; _Pembroke_, 1894; _Madelon_, 1896; _Jerome, a Poor Young Man_, 1897; _Silence_, 1898; _Evelina's Garden_, 1899; _The Love of Parson Lord_, 1900; _The Heart's Highway_, 1900; _The Portion of Labor_, 1901; _Understudies_, 1901; _Six Trees_, 1903; _The Wind in the Rose Bush_, 1903; _The Givers_, 1904; _Doc Gordon_, 1906; _By the Light of the Soul_, 1907; _Shoulders of Atlas_, 1908; _The Winning Lady_, 1909; _The Green Door_, 1910; _Butterfly House_, 1912; _Yates Pride_, 1912. ALICE BROWN. _Fools of Nature_, 1887; _Meadow Grass_, 1895; _Mercy Otis Warren_, 1896; _By Oak and Thorn_, 1896; _The Day of His Youth_, 1896; _The Road to Castaly_, 1896; _Robert Louis Stevenson--a Study_ (with Louise Imogen Guiney), 1897; _Tiverton Tales_, 1899; _King's End_, 1901; _Margaret Warrener_, 1901; _The Mannerings_, _High Noon_, _Paradise_, _The Country Road_, _The Court of Love_, 1906; _Rose MacLeod_, 1908; _The Story of Thyrza_, 1909; _County Neighbors_, _John Winterbourne's Family_, 1910; _The One-Footed Fairy_, 1911; _The Secret of the Clan_, 1912; _Vanishing Points_, _Robin Hood's Barn_, 1913; _Children of Earth_, [$10,000 prize drama], 1915. CHAPTER XII THE NEW ROMANCE The novelists who began their work in the seventies found themselves in a dilemma. On one side was the new school which was becoming more and more insistent that literature in America must be a thing American, colored by American soil, and vivid and vital with the new spirit of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hardy, Maupassant, Howells, that was thrilling everywhere like the voice of a coming era. But on the other hand there was the firmly set tradition that the new world was barren of literary material, that it lay spick and span with no romantic backgrounds save perhaps the Dutch Hudson and old Puritan Salem and colonial Boston. As late as 1872 the _North American Review_ declared that the true writer of fiction "must idealize. The idealizing novelists will be the real novelists. All truth does not lie in facts."[114] And it further declared that he must look away from his own land, where there is no shadow and no antiquity, into the uncharted fields of the imagination. "One would say that the natural tendency of the American novelist would be toward romance; that the very uniformity of our social life would offer nothing tempting to the writer, unless indeed to the satirist."[114]