Olympia's Journal. By W. S. Holnut. (G. Bell and Sons.)
— Olympia is a young English lady of fortune, residing at Florence. She has much beauty, many accomplishments, and a waist of twenty-one inches, " when she doesn't squeeze." Her hair, she has been told, is of the shade of a sun-ripened apricot ; but her strongest points are her complexion and teeth. Olympia desires to gain a name in literature, and reads " Pamela " and
Tom Jones " in order to improve her style. She looks upon people and things as " copy ; " and at two-and-twenty marries an eccentric self-made man of great wealth, not because she loves him, or because he is rich, but " solely as a model for a searching study such as might—nay, would—place me in the front rank of contemporary novelists." George Braithwaite cannot be the youthful author's hero, so she will make him her " subject." The girl discovers, when too late, that she has a heart, and that she has treated her husband wfth shameful selfishness. The story is not pleasant; the style, if not exactly slovenly, is immature, and some of the scenes are ludicrously absurd. "I am a failure, a complete failure," is the judgment which Olympia pronounces on herself at the advanced age of twenty-three ; and we should be inclined to pass a similar judgment on her journal were it not that the author has enough of the story-teller's craft to sustain the reader's attention. The book has many faults, but it will not send him to sleep
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