February – Sam’s notebook entry concerns Margaret Wade Deland’s first novel, John Ward, Preacher (1888) about the struggles of a Calvinist minister and his wife who does not share his faith. Sam wrote a criticism similar to that he would use against Jane Austen:

Surely the test of a novel’s characters is that you feel a strong interest in them & their affairs, — the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest — you want them all to land in hell together, & right away [MTNJ 3: 446].