20 JULY 1889, Page 24

Saved as by Fire. By Eleanor Mary Marsh. 3 vols.

(Hurst and Blackett.)—This novel appears to be the first work of its author, and is even more aggressively amateurish than the majority of first novels. Miss Marsh's style is both gushing and stilted, her conversations are impossible, the course of her story bears the faintest resemblance to real life, and she has acquired the irritating habit, much affected by the amateur, of peppering-

her pages with words and phrases from foreign languages, living- and dead. Still, the book is not without interest of a kind, and if

the writer will learn to write simply, and condescend to study Nature at first-hand, she may produce something better than Saved as by Fire.