ABSTRACT
She was brilliant. She came to novel-writing late in life (around the age of forty). She was extraordinary learned; completely fluent in French, and notoriously impatient with mediocrity. She wrote both with sympathy and with devastating critical insight about the privileged class. The form she found most congenial was the novel of manners. The great subject of her fiction—the subject which drew her attention most compellingly and repeatedly—was women.
