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262 these; finally he discovers salvation in physical labour. On a few such characters as this, on her style, and above everything else, on her feelings of kinship with a few square miles of Sussex earth, Miss Kaye-Smith can justly base a claim to a rank beside the dozen or half-dozen best novelists of her generation.

Yet if she ranks with the Young Englishmen, she is not one of them. There is a peculiar datelessness about her work that separates her from the experiments and bustling tract-novels of her contemporaries. I do not mean by this that she is not a very modern young woman, nor to hint that she does not possess perfect acquaintance with the literary movements of the last decade. At times she writes two or three paragraphs of Galsworthy; there is a chapter in The Four Roads that is utterly Wellsian; but these passages seem excrescences. At their best her novels partake of the timelessness of the subject; she is Sussex rather than Victorian or Georgian. The limits of her development are of the same nature; her art is bounded not so much by her understanding, by her technique, as geographically by the River Rother and the Royal Military Canal.