Harper & Brothers and Miss Hesper Le Gallienne for material on Gertrude Atherton, Margaret Deland and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. The Century Company for material on Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott. Frederick A. Stokes Company and Mr. William Morrow for material on Gertrude Atherton, Edna Ferber, Honoré Willsie and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Dodd, Mead & Company for material on Anna Katharine Green, Gertrude Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott. Henry Holt & Company and Miss Ellen Knowles Eayrs for material on Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Charles Scribner’s Sons for material on Edith Wharton. Little, Brown & Company for material on Mary E. Waller. THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS CHAPTER I EDITH WHARTON The order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also accidental, also and therefore; which is to say that it is not accidental at all. For if there is any lesson which life teaches us it is the existence of an order, a plan, in unsuspected places. To say, therefore, that a thing is accidental is to pay it the most glorious compliment. It is to say that it is ordered or ordained, decreed, immutably fixed upon from the Beginning--not of a book but of a Universe. There is about anything accidental something absolutely divine. To dart off at a tangent (for a mere moment) there was this much in the divine right of kings--an accident at the beginning of it. Had the kings contented themselves with this accidental character, had they preserved the spontaneity that surrounded the first of their crowd, there would be more of them left! But such reflections and the working out of them, a pleasurable kind of intellectual counterpoint, may be left to Gilbert Keith Chesterton. We are concerned wholly with the women who make our novels and, by the accident of title if you like, more with the women than with their novels. The two are no more perfectly separable than milk and cream and very often the best thing to do is not to try to separate them, but rather to stir them up together. As the only excuses for a book--other than a work of fiction--are either that it presents facts or suggests ideas, we shall try to talk rather simply (much more simply than in our first paragraph of this chapter) about American women novelists and their books--simply and honestly. If we say little about “literature” it is because what is usually described as literature is nothing better than a pale reflection of life.