Considered as fiction, _The Iron Woman_ is vitiated ever so slightly by the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty _not_ as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will dare, _will dare_, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say, did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we speak of _The Iron Woman_ as biography, the best and brightest of biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other.