Dolores

The first and till now the only edition of Dolores was published by Blackwood's in 1911. It sold well, and was promptly forgotten; apparently even its author did not want to remember it, since she did not publish another novel until 1925, nor did she include Dolores, the first of her twenty novels, in later lists of her publications.

But now that her career of sixty years is ended, and her long achievement more and more acclaimed, Dolores, standing at that remote beginning, is curiously reborn. When a writer is alive, his works tend to be regarded one by one, as they appear; when he is dead, they tend to be seen as the whole they have become. The genesis of genius attracts a natural speculation. If the author of Dolores preferred to forget it, her readers will not.

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She began to write with Delores (1911). "One wrote it as a girl" — and it is a juvenile and sentimental work in which a daughter's self-sacrifice, in the face of paternal selfishness, is regarded as noble; in the later mature novels such self-sacrifice would be roundly condemned. Nevertheless, there is already a great precision in phrasing, a happy eye for eccentricity, and a turn for aphorism.

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