Wife or Slave? By J. A. St. John Blythe. 3
vols. (Bentley.)--Mrs. Blythe—we conjecture female authorship, partly from a certain famili- arity with matters of the toilette, partly from other reasons which we shall leave the reader to discover, if he pleases, from this notice—thinks, no doubt, that she is doing good service to morals by writing a tale of this kind. If it be so, such good service is dearly purchased, for any- thing more repulsive than Wife or Slave ? we have seldom read. Hero is a sketch of the plot. A brother and sister are introduced, the sister a beautiful woman utterly demoralised by two mercenary marriages, the brother a stupid, sottish profligate. The father's will provides that if the brother is not married to a woman his equal in social position, audio not the father of either a son or a daughter before completing his twenty- eighth year, he is to forfeit a certain estate in favour of his sister. This estate the sister, being, it must be understood, very rich, sets herself to acquire. First, she seeks to entangle her brother with a keeper's daughter ; and then, when he marries a lady of good position, to lead his wife into evil. The wife, who has been sold in the most cynically open way both by her mother and her old lover, ends by running off with this lover. The keeper's daughter turns up with a son, and is proved to have been legitimately married. Her father finishes off the drama with a murder. Is it possible that people are found to read such staff as this? We might ask the question, were we not confronted by the greater mar- vel that some one has been found to write it, apparently without a notion that she has been doing anything but a good work for her fellow-creatures.
Previous page
