She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The _Atlantic_ which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same _Atlantic_ which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s _Van Cleve_ before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the _Atlantic_ serialized _Isidro_. The _North American Review_, no less severely selective than the _Atlantic_,--the _North American_, which had printed serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary Austin’s _The Man Jesus_ month by month. _The Man Jesus_ is a biography such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written. It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904, who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words: “Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.” If we say that _The Man Jesus_ called for unusual knowledge and an unusual faculty, what shall we say of _A Woman of Genius_? Some readers were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is possessed of”--or by--a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them. And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation. “About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke. “‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’ “It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....