"With Women Writers from America" — this is the title under which my series of articles is published. And holding that poetry is the most prominent and loftiest of literature's manifestations, the women of letters around whom the previous installments have turned, and around whom the coming ones will turn, have been poets. Nor is it difficult to write a number of articles about American women poets, for they are more plentiful than we might suppose, and the work of some of them reaches the summit.

In this article, however, I shall depart from the plan I laid out, and speak of two women who write prose, and who publish most of what they write in the Christian Science Monitor, which appears in Boston and is counted in the front rank of the country's newspapers. They do not, then, write literary prose — if we confine literary prose to novelistic, short-story, dramatic, and critical writing. And this is what led one of them, Mrs. Catherine Reynolds, to greet me at the outset by saying:

— But I am not a literary woman!

And what led the other, Mrs. Lydia L. Roberts, to say, with signs of apology on her face:

— Yes, I write — but about small, ordinary subjects!

I told her that I would devote this article to them precisely because they are not literary women, and because they write only about small, ordinary subjects!

*

Catherine Reynolds is the wife of Horace Reynolds, the literary commentator whose critical articles appear in the New York Times every Sunday. She is a dignified lady who speaks with deliberation and poise; her conversation is marked by depth and breadth. She has lived with her husband in Cambridge for more than twenty years, where they occupy a lovely house in one of the quiet parts of the town, and she works part of the day in the office of the dean of the Harvard Divinity School.

Around 1935 she began writing short articles which she published from time to time in the Monitor, signing them with nothing more than the first letters of her name. These articles vary in length and appear as occasion allows, not on fixed days of the week; but what unites them all is a character named Prudence, around whom the articles — written in an engaging story form — revolve. As for the subjects these articles treat, they are simple ones; their selection rests on no unbridled imagi-nation and no vast learning: she picks them from the home, from daily life, and from the atmosphere of the family. The material of her writing is her personal experience as a woman whose first task is the care of the members of her family and the management of the affairs of her house.

The essential point about this branch of literature is that it springs from the very heart of life, joining pleasure with profit. Prudence does not represent one girl only. She grows gradually from childhood into girlhood and then youth, and life's problems cross her path, as do

its delights — at home, among her girlfriends, at school, with her acquaintances of the other sex, on the job, and in all the walks of life. Prudence, I say, does not represent one girl to whom things happen that happen to no one else; she is in fact every American girl and, to some degree, every girl anywhere. For this reason mothers read Catherine Reynolds's articles with eagerness and take in the thoughtful opinions and counsels with which the articles teem — implicitly, not explicitly; and for this reason girls read them with pleasure and find in them pictures of themselves, of the stumbling-blocks they must avoid and the paths they must follow.

For this reason, too, it was not strange that the character of Prudence should become one of the figures known and beloved to the paper's women readers, or that Catherine Reynolds should be prompted to publish more of its installments, which can be read in sequence. I have gathered that the number of letters that reach the paper's editor-in-chief from women readers in every part of America — indeed from outside the country, even from Australia — praising the Prudence series, commenting on it, and urging more of it, far exceeds what he receives about the writings of any other writer or commentator on a paper whose contributing editors and writers are counted by the abundant dozens. And this popularity rests, as I see it, on what I have mentioned: on Mrs. Reynolds's drawing of her subjects from the very heart of life and her striking of sensitive chords in the souls of her women readers,

and on her penetrating view of life and her consequent ability to offer useful guidance, and on her literary skill, which makes of her articles pieces that are read, as I have said, for delight as well as for profit — and which clothes the guidance in the garb of a story, so that the young readers are not put off!

And though the installments of