In Herself Complete. By Francis Forbes-Robertson. (Vizetelly and Co.)—This love-tragedy—for,
since it ends badly, it must be re- garded as a tragedy—is written with great care, and with a genuine sweetness of style which will no doubt be found very enjoyable by what we may call, not offensively, but simply for want of a better term, the Bailie-Jones school of readers of fiction. The portraits of the unfortunate heroine, Freda St. Maur, and her boy-lover, Gerald, are also well drawn, and if there must needs be a Catholic priest who, from being a spiritual consoler, develops into a man, and exhibits and conquers a man's passion, there could not be a better than Father Victor Eedley. The ordinary reader will, however, resent the entrance into Freda's life of Maurice Martley and his somewhat man-of-the worldy Veni, vidi, rid. He ought to have allowed Gerald and Freda to marry in earnest as well as in play. As for the author of In Herself Complete, although there is promise in it, it would be impossible with safety to predict that it will be the first of a series of successes in fiction.
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