The book is strictly, religiously objective. Everything is perceived only through the eyes, the mind, the heart of the "heroine"--the word usage thrusts upon us for this woman who has no name, who is just truly herself. Through the commanding will of the author the creative richness of the book springs altogether from the magnificent oneness of a human being. No outside approach mars this unity. In no other book perhaps so markedly as in this has the integrity of an individual been more respected, and never has an imaginary character so consistently warded off whatever is not of itself. You don't even seem to feel that this "Woman" talks or tells a story. You simply know what she knows.
And because of this very fact, this intimate association which unites us jealously with this one being of all others, the book is poignant and moving. A world is born beneath our eyes. In some scenes, short or long but always important and vital, a tragedy shudders, and the entire succession of the events of life, ordinary and on a big scale, passes in the book in clear outline, in essential poetry.
To say this is to say that the author is a master, that her technique is subtle, that the action concentrates all the dramas of the world in one spiritual drama, and the book reveals a prodigious gift for presenting a whole of vast impressions which creates unity.
_Woman_ does not belong to any class of writing; it is not tied down by any formula; it does not lower itself by imitating. It is a powerful, a rebel, a virgin work, and it ranks Magdeleine Marx among the loftiest poets of our age.
I had just left the brambly path which cuts a bed of sand through the forest, laying bare its rusty bowels.
I felt full-fed by the subtle nourishment that space distils, crammed with air, and my forehead seemed drawn taut. Was it the motes dancing in the sunbeams? I don't know. I was spent. The fancy throbbed beneath my temples, did its work, and I let it go.
You must have been sincere at least once in your life to know what an hour is face to face with yourself, a whole hour, step by step, minute by minute. And I never had been sincere. Now I escaped from my clogging limbs, from the clay of myself. Until now I had done nothing but breathe and sleep. All of a sudden I was alive. It was intoxicating....