In 1890 came her marriage and three years of retirement.[169] It is, for many reasons, not strange that when she again took up her stage career a new era seemed to begin for her. Not only must her own nature, her insight, and her artistic equipment now have combined to qualify her for new and greater efforts; the whole English speaking theatre was gaining a new lease of life. Arthur Wing Pinero, just emerging into his period of sureness of technique and a frank facing of life; Henry Arthur Jones, dropping his earlier melodramatic manner and about to produce _Michael and His Lost Angel_; Oscar Wilde, with his momentary flash of high comedy; George Bernard Shaw, watchful of the experimentation of others and in addition well saturated with Ibsen; above all, the great Norwegian himself, whose influence knew no difference of language;--these men were, in the early nineties, bringing into English drama a vigor and a relation to life such as it had not enjoyed since the closing of the theatres in 1642. Mrs. Fiske was keenly, if to a certain degree unconsciously, alive to these influences. To one attuned they were the _zeitgeist_. With an eagerness new to the American theatre she was ambitious to attempt the modern drama--a drama honest and frank in its outlook on life, free from conventional restraint in its choice of themes, and taking its tone from the realities in human character. Not always have the qualities of the play been a match for the powers of the actress. Yet, looking over the period since 1893,[170] the list is distinctly noteworthy--first of all, Ibsen, who found in Mrs. Fiske a ready champion. _A Doll’s House_, _Hedda Gabler_, _Rosmersholm_, _The Pillars of Society_; surely they form a goodly showing. As for other Europeans, we have Sardou furnishing her, in _Divorçons_, an opportunity, brilliantly embraced, for comedy; Dumas _fils_ is represented by _La Femme de Claude_, Sudermann by _Magda_, and Hauptmann by the short play _Hannele_. Two of her greatest successes, _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ and _Becky Sharp_ were unusually skillful and satisfying experiments in that difficult form, the dramatized novel. _Leah Kleschna_ was worth while as an attempt to raise melodrama into the field of social drama; _The New York Idea_ is, so far, the best American example of sophisticated, ironic comedy; and in very recent days Edward Sheldon’s plays, _Salvation Nell_ and _The High Road_, have been courageous and justified experiments--the most striking examples we have had of the encouragement of the native dramatist of the newer school.