One of the trials of becoming an "important" novelist is that critics start to make hay with influences and trends. Miss Howard has already won a high reputation with her two earlier novels, and The Sea Change confirms her place among the important women novelists now writing. Though it would be a mistake to saddle her already with high-flown comparisons or influences—particularly since one is much aware of her potentialities and of the quiet confidence with which she is developing along her own lines—it may be worth quoting a remark of Henry James, who was similarly preoccupied with variations in technique. He says:

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

This is Miss Howard's constant theme, the flux of...