Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/24



a subject of composition like the novel, it is reasonable to expect a goodly proportion of what Monkbarns called “womankind” among the compositors. The subject is attractive to those tastes, and within the scope of those faculties, which are, generally speaking, characteristic of the fairer sex. Perhaps, indeed—and some critics would substitute "unquestionably" for "perhaps"—none but a man, of first-rate powers withal, can produce a first-rate novel; and, if so, it may be alleged that a woman of corresponding genius {quâ woman) can only produce one of a second-rate order. However that may be—and leaving the definition of what is first-rate and what second-rate to critics of a subtler vein and weightier calibre than we shall ever attain to—proofs there are, enough and to spare, in the literature of our land, that clever women can write, and have written, very clever novels; that this is a department where they feel and show themselves at home; that, in the symmetry of a complicated plot, the elaboration of varied character, and the filling-in of artistic touches and imaginative details, they can design and accomplish works which go down to posterity not very far behind those of certain Titanic lords of creation. As it was reasonable to predicate an abundance of female novelists, so is it evident, by every circulating library and every advertising journal, that such abundance exists. Almost the earliest pieces of prose fictions in our language are from the pen of a woman—not the most exemplary of her sex—Mistress Aphra Beha, the "Astræa" of Charles the Second's days. After the novel, more properly so called, had acquired a local habitation and a name amongst us, by the performances of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, we find, during the past century, an imposing array of "womankind" successfully cultivating these "pastures new." Clara Reeve wrote several tales of the "Otranto" type, all marked, in the judgment of Sir Walter Scott, by excellent good sense, pure morality, and a competent command of those qualities which constitute a good romance. If the Minerva Press deluged the town with its spring-tide of fluent nonsense, much of it the billowy froth of feminine as well as effeminate "Persons of Quality," there soon uprose to stem the current a succession of ladies who could cope better with its surges than Mrs. Partington with those of the Atlantic. Mrs. Radcliffe is by no means the beau-ideal of a novelist; yet even her atrocities were an improvement upon, and instrumentally fatal to, the squeamish woes of that maudlin clique. Then, too, came Charlotte Smith, of "Old Manor House" celebrity; and little Fanny Burney, with her Evelinas and Cecilias and Camillas; and the sisters Lee, with their "Canterbury Tales" and the sisters Porter, of whom Anna Maria alone published half a century of volumes; and Mrs. Brunton, the still popular authoress of "Self-Control"; and Miss Edgeworth, whose gift it was to "dispense common sense to her readers, and to bring them within the precincts of real life and natural feeling.” As we approach more closely to our own times, the name of the fair company becomes legion. Mrs. Shelley appears;