In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman at last melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one -- among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway -- where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins.

[...] Diana's husband feels the sting of her independence. He broods on it, then falls into a rage, brings suit against her, naming the MP as corespondent. But he cannot prove his case. The Warwicks separate and, with her reputation barely intact, Diana sets herself up as a political hostess and begins writing novels and articles to make a living. Soon her books are being reviewed, and every MP in town wants to have dinner at Diana's.

She blossoms into a glorious creature. Her mind grows tough, honest, wise, her speech witty, her insights luminous. She is unsentimental. She takes in her own experience. After the separation, alone for the first time, in ''lodgings," Diana receives her friend Lady Emma, who is appalled, and asks if she can really like this. Diana replies, "I do. Yes, I can eat when I like, walk, work -- and I am working! My legs and my pen demand it. Let me be independent! Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes. In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing room exotic. Much is repulsive. But I am taken with a passion for reality!"

As Diana's intelligence strengthens it takes in ever harder truths. She begins to see that her independence is intimately related to the clarity of her thought, and she comes to believe that the increasing goodness of her mind is linked to passions held in check. Passionate feeling, she is persuaded, is the undoing of a woman's independence. Diana gazes with a cold, clear eye -- remarkably cold -- at her calculation of life's cost. In London it is said of her that she is cold by nature. We, too, see her as cold, but not by nature.

[...] She'd rather place herself on the other side of the law (their law) than become a prisoner of her own weakest self. She will be vile but she will be free. Free to enter herself. Love, she knows, is not the way in. Into herself is through the mind, not through the senses. That is what freedom means to Diana.

She is wrong, of course. She will not be free. Free is not through the working mind or the gratified senses; free is through the steady application of self-understanding. Diana is too angry and too frightened to be free. In her panic she savages Percy and deforms herself. Like an animal in a frenzy, she tears loose of the trap, leaving behind a limb. For the rest of her life she will lick a wound covered over by scar tissue. Courage she has in great measure; it is self-knowledge she lacks.

Meredith's great forgotten novel brings these thoughts into focus. The language is of another century as is the social circumstance, but the central interest in Diana's headlong plunge toward herself is of a remarkable immediacy. When Diana's love affair goes on the rocks, we are not at all awash in regret, so absorbing are the real events of her inner life -- the excitement of her false independence, the swiftness with which she spins out of control, the ugliness when she feels threatened -- and so moving the intelligence with which she tries to take in the meaning of what she has lived. It is the drama of the self we are witnessing -- that astonishing effort to climb up out of original shame -- and the awful, implicit knowledge that love, contrary to all sentimental insistence, cannot do the job for us. For better and for worse, that effort is a solitary one, more akin to the act of making art than of making family. It acknowledges, even courts, loneliness. Love, on the other hand, fears loneliness, turns sharply away from it.

Clover had no similar relief: nothing was expected of her. She ran the salon, she socialized skillfully, she exercised a wit that as time passed yielded less pleasure, less energy, less meaning. In short: she had no work. No work meant inner drift. The men in her circle were each compelled by inner necessity to convert disability to virtue -- especially Henry whose genius it was to make of his own self-doubt an instrument of historic interpretation -- but Clover remained an intelligent woman who feared being thought a blue, condemned to back off from the only kind of struggle that would have sufficiently freed her from the same conviction of inner worthlessness that dogged the men around her. With no useful way to vent themselves, her anxieties went underground where they increasingly transformed into postures of spiritual inertness, hesitating thought, demoralized will. In time she became that which women were accused of being by nature.

All these men -- a diplomat, a historian, a paid wanderer -- struggled mightily with demons they could not master. But every day, throughout their lives, each one went out to do battle with the world; doing battle with the world allowed them to do battle with themselves; doing battle with themselves they brought their miseries under enough control to achieve sufficient detachment; achieving detachment they did the work that gives human existence its meaning.

Certainly, she had read Esther, but what had she made of it? Nowhere, in any of her letters, does she say. We know only that now, in the winter of 1883, she had become dangerously bored. Everything and everyone was tiresome to her. Besieged by arrivistes, she had come to hate her own five o'clocks. ("Life is like a prolonged circus here now," she wrote her father.) People still came to dinner, but she no longer cared to go out. Ladies' luncheons were "a style of killing time which I detest"; diplomatic dinners were attended by people with brains "attenuated to a startling degree"; large parties were "hot rooms and crowds" that "take so much more from one than they give." She preferred to stay home and read.

How could it have been otherwise? In any life, the doubts, the depressions, the absence of self-belief -- if not engaged with --progressively worsen, moving ineluctably from occasional ailment to recurrent episode to chronic condition. The condition occupies space, eats up air, consumes energy. Energy that should have fed experience now feeds the unlived life. The unlived life is not a quiescent beast. The unlived life is a little animal in a great rage, barely permitting of survival. And sometimes not even that. Sometimes, it ends an assassin.

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 theme -- it was the woman because it was the woman who came to married life the least experienced, untried and unknowing.

Women, more often than men, awakened from the long dream of adolescence to find themselves bound in perpetuity into their lives without any realization of how they had gotten there. Men suffered, too, from the condition -- she could see that -- but when all was said and done, after the awakening men knew better how to make use of the baptism by fire. Women were left staring into the fire.

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 her true subject be? What would make the words come alive under her pen? What did she know on the surface of things, and what did she know down to the bone? To think about what she felt: that would be her life's work.

In 1912 she left McClure's for good (she had tried a number of times before but could not manage it), settled into an apartment on Bank Street with her friend Edith Lewis (a copyeditor at the magazine), and began to live the remarkably quiet life that produced an unbroken flow of novels, stories, and essays over the next thirty years. Greenwich Village in the twenties and thirties was exploding with Freud, Marx, and Emma Goldman, but for Cather it was all happening at a great distance. In the country of her life these were border disturbances. By 1918 she had written O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. From the beginning, her books brought recognition and money. She spent the winter in New York, the summer in Nebraska and New Mexico. In the fall or spring she often went to New Hampshire. A number of times she traveled to Europe. Music remained a passion, and many of her friends were musical. She grew handsome as she grew older but, essentially, remained the large smiling plain-faced woman she had always been, wearing schoolgirl middy blouses into her fifties, unfashionable and immature until it was safe, in her famous sixties, to put on the beautiful silk dresses she did know how to wear.