<DIV>When it first appeared in 1926, <i>The Hard-Boiled Virgin</i> was hailed by novelist James Branch Cabell as "the most brilliant, the most candid, the most civilized, and most profound book yet written by any American woman". It is a semiautobiographical novel about Atlantan Katharine Faraday, who, after numerous anguishing relations with men, chooses a career and independence over marriage and motherhood.<p>Though somewhat avant garde, with its impressionistic air, absence of dialogue, and evocations of Virginia Woolf, <i>The Hard-Boiled Virgin</i> posed enough of a threat to middle class attitudes toward women to be banned in Boston. Intending her novel to undermine the white, tradition-bound, upper-class Atlanta society into which she was born, Frances Newman commented that she discovered that she "was going to write a novel about a girl who began by believing every thing her family and her teachers said to her, and who ended by disbelieving most of those things".</DIV>