Talk:One Way of Love (Lee)

Information about this edition
Edition:	Extracted from Lippincott's Magazine, Feb 1906, pp. 129–183.
Source:	https://archive.org/details/sim_mcbrides-magazine_1906-02_77_458
Contributor(s):	ragpicker
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Proofreaders:	ragcleaner

Review

• The Graphic 24 Feb 1906:

The Journalist in Fiction.

Current fiction reflects the estimate that a nation places upon its leaders in thought and action, and fiction today is beginning to recognize the splendid material in the person of the many-sided journalist. For some time past both American and British writers have produced interesting short stories in which the newspaper-man figures prominently, and occasionally this new type of hero has been selected as the central figure for novels, as in Comfort's “The Fortress.”

But newspaper hustle is the side of a journalist's life usually selected for exploitation by fiction-writers in general. Now comes Jennette Lee with an effective reverse picture in her novelette “One Way of Love," which appears in February Lippincott's. Here is a portrayal of that phase of the newspaper man's character the tender human part-which only his dear ones know when he is off duty. The picture is drawn with a sure hand and does honor to a class of men who possess in a markedly typical sense the sincerest qualities of American manhood.

The recognition of this intimate side of the newspaper 1nan's character harmonizes with the well known fact that a large number of our successful American authors received their training in the journalistic school—from which many have not been content to graduate, but have gone back to its fascinations again and again, until, bowed by years, as famous authors they have actually died in the editorial harness.

Mrs. Lee has added a psychological element to her tale “One Way of Love” which greatly accents the artistic form, and which will be greatly appreciated by all who know or are in sympathy with the life of the journalist whose search for news leads through strange byways. When “the man” in the novel meets with a disappointment at the outset of his career, the scales, weighted by his grief, dip so far that it seems as if he must go under. But an older man's experience and advice save him. As the title indicates, “One Way of Love” is at last found to assure his soul's peace.

The lucid directness of Mrs. Lee's story fits well its sincere characterization of New England people whose inheritance is that of brains, not money. The author—the wife of Gerald Stanley Lee—is herself a New England woman and a Smith College girl. After receiving her diploma she taught at both Smith and Vassar, and is now living at Northampton, Mass., where she absorbs the atmosphere which breathes through her lives of New England characters. The real action of the story, however, is planed in Chicago, where the hero adopts newspaper work and finds the woman who becomes his inspiration.