20 APRIL 1895, Page 25

A Girl's Folly. By Annie Thomas (Mrs. Pender Cudlip). 3

vols.

(F. V. White and Co.)—It is of very little use to waste space in the critical appraisement of a novel which is a work of manufac- ture, not of art, and in which even the manufacturing processes have been very carelessly conducted. In A Girl's Folly the story is simply thrown together with hardly an attempt at anything like organic coherence; the characters, with one or two excep- tions, are quite unreal ; the murder which helps to bring about the denouement is committed without a motive, or with a motive that is ludicrously inadequate ; and we can find nothing attractive in the book except a certain vivacity in which Mrs. Ponder Cudlip's novels are seldom deficient.