"Woman Alone"appeared in The Nationin 1927as the ninth in a ser-
ies of anonymous articles "giving the personal backgrounds of women
with a modern point of view." ¹ This autobiographical essay gives an
important and focused look at the early development of Austin's thinking,
particularly concerning her sense of identity as a woman and her self-
consciously "radical" sense of gender conflict.

In contrast to her 1932 book-length autobiography Earth Hori-
zon, written largely from a third person point of view about "Mary,"
"Woman Alone" reveals Austin in a significantly more personal and
familiar voice, even as she insists on the need of women for "detach-
ment from the personal issue" in their relationships with men. In ad-
dition, Austin's sense of an "inherency of design" ² in the pattern of her
life and its narrative, which she describes in some detail in Earth Ho-
rizon, is also suggested here in the very specific terms of the evolution
and determinancy of her feminism.

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