A Mad Marriage: a Novel. By Mrs. 314 Agnes Fleming.
(Tinsley Brothers.)—The law of divorce has naturally provided a fruitful theme for novelists,—one capable of treatment in a variety of ways, and in most cases fairly interesting. We do not blame a story-teller for availing him or herself—it is generally the latter—of the complications in the human tragedy which divorce affords, but it does strike us as a little unreasonable that writers who intend to construct their novels out of this particular kind of material should not take the preliminary trouble and precaution to acquaint thems elves with even the outline, the first principles of the law. Mrs. May Agnes Fleming is only one among several novel-writers who have gone wildly astray in their notions of its provisions and conditions, but she is perhaps the gravest offender. The whole story of A Mad Marriage is founded upon an impossibility. Mr. Gordon Caryll marries Miss Rosamond Lovell, and afterwards discovers that she is not the daughter of Colonel Lovell, but is a girl of low birth and disreputable antecedents, who has been a concert-singer. She is exceedingly beautiful, and only eighteen, and the dark ex- periences of her former life must, to say the least of it, have been hurried up a good deal. She is betrayed by the unex- plained villany of Colonel Lovell, and flies from her house in terror of her husband's fury. He traces, finds her, and confronts her with a newspaper report of the divorce suit which he has instituted and gained. The trifling circumstances that no notice has been given her, and that there is no charge whatever against her as a wife, and therefore her husband could not get a divorce from her, are apparently- beyond the author's knowledge, or beneath her notice. The story is tawdry and sensational, with men in it who have Greek beauty, azure eyes, unlimited money, and boundless vices; and women in it who have topaze eyes, voluptuous forms, sensuous, red lips, and extraordinary fashions of dressing themselves. They are costumed a good deal after Onida's heroines, whose "waiting-women "—they don't have mere "maids," of course—wrap "some cashmeres " round them, on occasions when ladies who are only men's wives put on their dressing-gowns. Mrs. May Agnes Fleming sends her topaze-eyed demon forth in "vel- vets," and " sables," and " seals," which remind one of the homely simile about butter on bacon ; but that sort of thing is very taking, no doubt, to the milliner's-girl taste. A little more accuracy in the use of French phrases would improve Mrs. Fleming's future works. She makes a feature of a family motto, and writes it, "Loyal au inert," and she talks. of "jeunesse dore." The book is like one of Bret Harte's caricatures of sensation novels, long drawn out into three volumes.
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