Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/110

98, balanced by judgment and matured by experience, explains the success they have met with in the domain of fictitious literature.

Again and again Miss Edgeworth proved the fecund creativeness with which she could delineate the moral and intellectual anatomy of the most varied and various characters. Her personages are animate with life and brightness. Above all else she was an artist in detail, and never more felicitous than when furnishing studies of foible in female form. Of this the Modern Griselda is a notable instance, a brilliant performance, almost too brilliant, for it scintillates with wit and epigrammatic wisdom, it never fails or flags for one little moment, so that at last the reader's attention is in danger of being surfeited by a feast of good things. The fable is the direct opposite to that of the old story of Griselda. In the words of Milton we are shown how it befalls the man

This the Modern Griselda does to her husband's cost and her own. The story is a remarkable evidence of Miss Edgeworth's independence of genius. She showed no weak sympathy with the failings of her sex just because it was her sex, but, like a true friend, held them up to view and pointed them out for correction. Her objectiveness did not ensure her, however, from misconstruction; Mrs. Barbauld wrote to her:—

I became very impatient for your Griselda before Johnson thought proper to produce it; need I add we have read it with great pleasure. It is charming, like everything you write, but I can tell you the gentlemen like it better than the ladies, and if you were to be tried by a jury of your own sex, I do not know what punishment you might be sentenced to for having betrayed their cause. "The author