the ancients and the moderns on even terms—did not betray their art. They tell of events, sad or ridiculous, and seek no further. They do not spin psychology. That they leave to their readers or their critics or the professional psychologists.
This simple truth seems to have flashed upon the simple mind of Carolina Invernizio when in her early youth she undertook the writing of her first novel. She was well aware that a novel is written to amuse, and is read for the sake of amusement. So then it calls for many facts, for surprising and intricate combinations, for fancy unrestrained, for plenty of action, for a clever plot in which the splendor of virtue and the shadow of vice shall find their place. Her readers, and especially her feminine readers, have been completely satisfied by novels so composed, and her success is a proof of the intrinsic and undeniable excellence of the method. Her novels have been sold and are still sold by the hundred thousand wherever women’s hearts beat for the misfortunes of innocence and the Italian tongue is read and understood. Before the war her publisher, Salani, sent whole shiploads of her novels to South America. And they were sold and were read far more than the works of her superior colleagues, far more than the volumes of De Amicis or d’Annunzio. The editions of her most famous books are as numerous as those of the
