The Adventuress. By Mrs. Edwardes. (Bentley and Son.)— The author
sets herself a hard task,—to make her readers like
her heroine. She has achieved, we should say, a fair success. The " adventuress "—unless indeed this title more properly belongs to the intriguing elder sister who seeks to control the destiny of Rose Hathaway—has a heart, and the development of this heart into a power that finally orders her fate, is described with no little skill. We are less pleased with a character which
is evidently intended as a masculine ideal.--the parsnn, Richard Firmin. There is a large class of fiction in which it seems to be an essential that the hero should have "a past," and The Adven- turess belongs to it. That a man who had gone through the experiences of Richard Pirmin may do good work in the world, we would not for a moment deny ; but we do not like to see such experiences paraded.