One other influence, hardly less effective in molding the Novel than those already touched upon, is found in the increasing importance of woman as a central) factor in society; indeed, holding the key to the social situation.  The drama of our time, in so frequently making woman the protagonist of the piece, testifies, as does fiction, to this significant fact:  woman, in the social and economic readjustment that has come to her, or better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more dominant in her social relations, that any form of literature truthfully mirroring the society of the modern world must regard her as of potent efficiency.  And this is so quite apart from the consideration that women make up to-day the novelist’s largest audience, and that, moreover, the woman writer of fiction is in numbers and popularity a rival of men.

It would scarcely be too much to see a unifying principle in the evolution of the modern Novel, in the fact that the first example in the literature was Pamela, the study of a woman, while in representative latter-day studies like “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” “The House of Mirth,” “Trilby” and “The Testing of Diana Mallory” we again have studies of women; the purpose alike in time past or present being to fix the attention upon a human being whose fate is sensitively, subtly operative for good or ill upon a society at large.  It is no accident then, that woman is so often the central figure of fiction:  it means more than that, love being the solar passion of the race, she naturally is involved.  Rather does it mean fiction’s recognition of her as the creature of the social biologist, exercising her ancient function amidst all the changes and shifting ideas of successive generations.  Whatever her superficial changes under the urge of the time-spirit, Woman, to a thoughtful eye, sits like the Sphinx above the drifting sands, silent, secret, powerful and obscure, bent only on her great purposive errand whose end is the bringing forth of that Overman who shall rule the world.  With her immense biologic mission, seemingly at war with her individual career, and destructive apparently of that emancipation which is the present dream of her champions, what a type, what a motive this for fiction, and in what a manifold and stimulating way is the Novel awakening to its high privilege to deal with such material.  In this view, having these wider implications in mind, the role of woman in fiction, so far from waning, is but just begun.

This survey of historical facts and marshaling of a few important principles has prepared us, it may be hoped, for a clearer comprehension of the developmental details that follow.  It is a complex growth, but one vastly interesting and, after all, explained by a few, great substructural principles:  the belief in personality, democratic feeling, a love for truth in art, and a realization of the power of modern Woman.  The Novel is thus an expression and epitome of the society which gave it birth.