It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this naïve process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier--as in _Isidro_ or _Lost Borders_ or _The Ford_--or with more crowded, more complex regions--as in _The Woman of Genius_ or _26 Jayne Street_--she keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as a symbol of the sources of human life and society. She creates, it seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than reflection. She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual and the long memories of the race. The effect upon her novels of such methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure and sometimes obscure in meaning. If they are not glib, neither are they always clean-cut or direct. Along with her generous intelligence she has a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities. She wears something like the sibyl's robes and speaks with something like the sibyl's strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her. Much of her significance lies in her promise. Faithful to her original vision, she has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations. _Immigrants_ The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Russia, Rumania, Syria, Italy have come passionate pilgrims who have set down, mostly in plain narratives, the chronicles of their migration. As the first Americans contended with nature and the savages, so these late arrivals contend with men and a civilization no less hostile toward them; their writings continue, in a way, the earliest American tradition of a concern with the risks and contrivances by which pioneers cut their paths. Even when the immigrants write fiction they tend to choose the same materials and thus to fall into formulas, which are the more observable since the writers are the survivors in the struggle and naturally tell about the successes rather than the failures in the process of Americanization.