WE SING DIANA By Wanda Fraiken Neff

To Nora Deming, growing up in a quiet country town, men, women, and life itself were teasing problems. Men were freer than women, she thought—less bound by custom, less enslaved by their own timidities. At Petersfield, the great women’s college, and in New York and London, she found others who like herself led half-lives, suppressing their emotions and concealing their disillusionment. What was it that women wanted?

‘We Sing Diana’ tells the tale of Nora’s search for fulfillment,—her career, her activities, her friends, and last and greatest of all, her passionate acceptance of love. To many women the story will show in a flash of revelation the problems and abysses in their own and their friends’ lives hitherto only dimly apprehended. To men it will come as a novel glimpse into a modern woman’s inner life in a world where men have little part. And all its readers, regardless of their sex, will appreciate its masculine candor, its feminine intuition, its convincing sincerity and above all its narrative power that permits no flagging of interest from the first page to the last.

WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF

author of ‘We Sing Diana’, began writing for a children’s paper connected with the Minneapolis Journal at the age of nine and says that she has been covering paper with experimental writing ever since. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1909, taught in a wide variety of schools and colleges, ranging from Colorado and Wisconsin to New York and Virginia, and acquired an M.A. degree at Columbia in 1917.

She began collecting material for ‘We Sing Diana’ during the years 1921-1922, when the American Association of University Women sent her to England to study the history of Victorian working women. Instructorships at Barnard and at Vassar gave her contact with contemporary segregated education of women, and marriage in 1925, the necessary leisure, as well as detachment, to begin work on this brilliant and convincing story of a woman who attempts to find creative satisfaction in intellectual work.

She is the wife of Professor Emery Neff of Columbia University and spends most of her time in New York City, which she knows from Harlem to Greenwich Village.

WE SING DIANA

WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF

WE SING DIANA

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston and New York 1928

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO THE MEMORY OF BELLE MANSEAU FRAIKEN

CONTENTS

Part I. The Neophyte 1 Part II. The Sacred Grove 47 Part III. Actæon 133 Part IV. Mount Latmos 221

We sing Diana