Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee. The main portion of the following story appearedβwith slight modificationsβin the Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer , as episodic sketches.
My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago. This novel being one wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well-known catastrophe.
For this responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand. I include amongst them the reviewersβby far the majorityβwho have so generously welcomed the tale.
Their words show that they, like the others, have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own imaginative intuition. Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply and in the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the rendering.
(mh=-Fojmj1w81NB1xml)13.jpg "Woman in Grand Forks")
The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of opinion concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and reveal an inability to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective with any but the artificial and derivative meaning which has resulted to it from the ordinances of civilization.
