Baltimore Evening Sun (27 November 1911): 6.

Ten years ago an obscure fellow named Theodore Dreiser wrote a novel called “Sister Carrie” and submitted it to a publishing firm in New York. The late Frank Norris was then chief reader for the firm. He read “Sister Carrie,” emitted a whoop of exultation, and insisted that the manuscript be put into type at once. One day the head of the firm took home the proofsheets for his wife to read. Her verdict was that the story was distressingly improper—and Dreiser was notified the next day that it would not be published.

The rest of the tale you probably recall by now--how a few review copies were sent out, to silence the protesting Dreiser, how the critics lavished praises upon the book, how the public tried in vain to buy it, how an English edition was published by William Heinemann, how William J. Locke, Arnold Bennett, Frank Harris and other such fellows were aroused to enthusiasm, how in the end a second American edition was printed and this time actually published, and how, after six or seven years, the discouraged Dreiser began reaping the rewards of his work.

Now, ten years after “Sister Carrie,” comes his second book, “Jennie Gerhardt,” to wit—a sort of painstaking working-over of the theme of the earlier one. Not, of course, that “Jennie Gerhardt” is a mere second telling of “Sister Carrie.” Far from it, indeed. Dreiser has grown in 10 years, and his method has grown with him. A greater understanding now illuminates his work; he has attained to a considerably more accurate and searching philosophy. But once again his heroine is a woman whose gentleness is her undoing--once again he is in the midst of a tragedy whose moral it is that all the stock morals are untrue--once again he sets forth for us, like Conrad and Moore and the great Russians, the eternal meaninglessness of life.

The scene of the story is the Middle West and the class from which Jennie comes is that oppressed by dire poverty. Her father is an honest, pious, inefficient German--a glassblower out of work and fast descending to enforced parasitism. Her mother is a sentimental washerwoman. And yet out of this ashheap there grows a flower. Jennie is shabby and ignorant, but there lingers about her, nevertheless, an indefinable charm--a charm not of person alone, but more especially of personality. There is in her, in brief, a compelling spiritual dignity. She is one of those rare souls whose contact to refreshing, reassuring, inspiring. Her outlook upon the world is that of wonder and joy, half the child’s and half the poet’s. Herself a part of its beauty, a subtle sense of that beauty radiates from her. * * *

George Sylvester Brander, a United States Senator, 50 years old and mourning his lost youth, is the pioneer from the great world who discovers Jennie. Their meeting is fortuitous, prosaic. Jennie and her mother get work at scrubbing stairways in Brander’s hotel. There one day, a sentimental mood upon him, he notices them, says a kind word to them, impulsively offers to help them. At first only pity appears in his relations with Jennie. He is sorry that so pretty and modest a girl should have to scrub stairs. But before long he gets a better understanding of her. He begins to find her strangely attractive, not merely as a chance representative of a luckless class, but also as an unusual, an inviting personality. He sees her potentialities; he pictures her out of the grip of poverty; he looks ahead into her possible future. In the end he falls frankly in love with her—somewhat to his amusement and a bit to his dismay.

Brander, however, is no man to be long halted, even by his own follies. He is more than a little weary with life; he sees in Jennie an invitation to that romance he has missed. So he resolves to educate and marry her. The affair drags along. A political battle creates a diversion. Returning to Jennie he pledges his honor to make her his wife. Then death suddenly strikes him down. Jennie is left pathetically on the rocks--the betrayed maiden of the books. That great world which she has glimpsed has shut its doors in her face, and now her own world, too, will havenone of her. But after all she has made genuine progress. Brander has set her wings to fluttering. She is not the dumb creature she was. Beyond the Alps of her agony and shame lies the Italy of her unfolding.

Altogether there are but two men in Jennie’s life. Enter now the second--Lester Kane. The story proceeds leisurely through complex episodes--not complex in their externals, but complex in the psychological play within them. The aim is to show the development, the maturing of Jennie, the woman. Kane, like Brander, is of the ruling caste, a man dominating and inspiring, a man rich in experience and able to convey the essence of that experience to those about him. The effect of his proximity is to complete the work of transforming Jennie. The child of dire need is now forgotten. We have before is a woman highly civilized, a woman sensitive and of dignity, a woman capable of heroic sacrifice, a woman of true nobility of character--in Dreiser’s phrase, a big woman.

But—and here is the trgedy—the world has no work for such a woman, no high usefulness, no place of service. Jennie may be all she is, but she is also something she ought not to be. The very relation that has exalted her has also degraded her. She owes the enriching and unfolding of her character to Brander and Kane, but she also owes to that contact her isolation, her social sterility, her human uselessness. The years pass. Kane, drawn by ties of family and class, marries another woman. After a while he dies. Jennie’s daughter—the daughter of Brander—also dies. Her old father dies. In the end she faces that blank future which was the tragedy, too, of Carrie Meeber. “Days and days in endless reiteration and then”-- * * *

I indicate, of course, only a few highlights of this remarkable study of a human soul. The actual story must await your own curiosity. Its effect of tragedy, of hopeless struggle, of the meaninglessness of life, is the thing that sets it off from the common fictions of the day, but if it had no such quality it would still be noteworthy for its merits of mere technic. Not only Jennie herself, but also Kane, old Gerhardt and the lesser figures are extraordinarily lifelike—particularly old Gerhardt. The thing is done with superb assurance. It has in it the elaborate painstaking, the sober thoughtfulness of George Moore. It reveals a novelist who has something to say and who knows how to say it.