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In 1925 Woolf and Rhys seemed sophisticated, Cather an American provincial. When Jean Rhys wrote "he left me all smashed up," she meant, "life and history inevitably leave one all smashed up." Cather, on the other hand, wrote as one who saw herself pitted against the elements in a fair fight, and t…

Still later, Fred Ottenburg, the rich man who loves her but, like all the men in this book, wants Thea to have her life, says to her,

Don't you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? . . . A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance …

But against the fear and the anxiety, the drive was gathering. Slowly, there accumulated in her the compulsion to write out of the experience of her inner life. To discover for herself what it was she knew about human beings, really knew, and to spend her life exploring that territory. What would h…

But the situation does not wear well. It feels dated and neurasthenic

She had discovered something else as well: that under the best of circumstances marriage was an opposition of wills. One or the other of the married couple was always being gently, subtly, lovingly pushed out of shape; dominated; made to do the bidding of the other. Usually -- but this was not her …