[Maria Dąbrowska was] a major writer and a moral force in her nation under several vastly different political régimes.

Never an habituée of literary cafés, all through her life she remained a provincial in the same noble sense that Flaubert had been a provincial in France and Faulkner in the United States—an uninhibited artist contributing to universal values, not as a cosmopolitan, only as a supremely civilized voice coming from a backwater. That salt-of-the-earth quality of her work was never belied by the public attitudes of the frail looking woman; in an age of political promiscuity and moral indifference she grew into a monolithic figure respected by both friends and foes. (p. 3)

[Dąbrowska's] mind was pragmatic, liberal, objective. Doctrines did not mean much to her…. [Political] and economic theory, she maintained [in an article on Russian socialism], is good if it increases...