As nothing is more engrossing than to watch growth
and to trace the origins of a great achievement, it seems
well worth while to the Publishers to present to the many
thousand admirers of Sheila Kaye-Smith this reprint of
her remarkable first novel in a new edition which should
prove of real and permanent interest.
It would appear almost incredible that such a mas-
terly character-study, giving stark and extraordinarily
vivid pictures of the spiritual deadness and degradation
of England's national church and of the inhuman condi-
tions of jails and criminal procedure in the early Nine-
teenth Century, should be the work of a girl barely out
of her teens-yet, such is the fact. And it would seem
almost equally difficult to believe-though of interest to
recall, in view of Miss Kaye-Smith's present secure and
eminent position among writers-that an English edi-
tion of this astonishing first work of hers was imported
in 1908, and published by a New York firm, without at-
tracting any particular attention, either from the reading
public or from the critics.