A New Woman Novel, this South African tale reads like a modernist novel in its fragmentary shape, thematic oddities, and brute refusal to bow down to generic convention. As cruel as a Hardy tale in casting down its heroine to destruction and social ostracization, and as indelicate as one of Katherine Mansfield’s “murder” tales, it yet has moments of beauty, illumination, and transcendent possibility. Above all, the colonial world is one of incommensurability, where the different elements of European social order refuse to hang together nicely but rather brush up against each other harshly. Though decadent in its refusal to discount anything as beautiful or worthy of narrative, as well as in its boldness of imagery and theme, it doesn’t have decadence’s air of pastness, of coming too late, of decay, but instead features a Darwinian world of contest alive and well, rather than a civilized world of over-refinement.