"Bnaxces -Newstan's Lerrens."—Edited Hansell Haugh, with" preface by James Branch" Cabell, New York: Horace Liveright.
In October, 1928, Miss Frances Newman, author of "The Hard Boiled Virgin" and "Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers," wrapped the curtain of her couch' about her and lay down to dreamless sleep. She in her early forties. ~(Her biographer and Miss Newman herself in her note for "Who's Who" of that year are reticent about. her birth date.) She had been suffering bad health, particularly in her Inter months. And she had, apart from this, been growing progress sively disillusioned and fil at ease in a world whose human warmth had somehow failed to penetrate her cold bones.
In the eight years of her literary] career—which began in 1920 with a sequence of "Library Notes, on Contemporary Authors" for "The Atlanta Constitution" (she was then a librarian in the city of her nativity)—she wrote two brilliant novels, a volume of criticism, "The Short Story's Mutations"; a very few short stories and many book reviews, turned over to Liveright less than two weeks before her death her translation of Jules Laforgue's to. be published as Tales," and had projected a tory of Sophistication" and novel, to be called "There's a Certain Elegance About Celibacy." Of the body of her work Mr. James: Branch Cabell, her discoverer and; continuously, "her most prized literary patron, says somewhat prodigally: corded to Frances Newman she "would but es supreme, sngwomen. writers, of Americh seers She has left no peers, Neither Mr. Cabell nor we can profitably engage in discussion of the might-have-been, Yet from Miss Newman's letters to her friends, her family, her publishers, to her literary enthusiasm and. to cor from Mr. Cabell himself wer can pick up some insight into the source of Miss Newman's discontent with fife and some intimation of "the! imitations that her own. tempe ment laid on an indisputably bril Tiant talent.
Miss Newman was incorrigibly.
creasingly egocentric. Not in ilosophic fashion that puts perforce og the necessary center of the apperceptive universe, bot trivially. She had an ins defatigable faith" in literary logrolling, in the value of autographed books, in fuchsia shades for her adornment—which she carried to Such an extreme of affectation that she slept happily only in a purple bed and used three-cent_ purple stamps to pay for the caffiage of her purple correspondence. - The plotting and manipulation—as re-Yealed. in her letters—which she devoted to the effort to get herself photographed with Mr. Catell for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.