Nover.s.—Pretty Miss Neville. By B. M. Croker. 3 vols. (Tinsley
Brothers.)—The first volume of this novel relates the sayings and doings of the heroine while she is living at her Irish home, and was a very plain-looking hoyden. In the second volnmo she is transported to India, and blooms out into the "Pretty Miss Neville" who supplies a title to the story. In her hoyden stage she has been engaged to her cousin, the heir of her grandfather's estate, and this engagement is the source of no little complication when she enters upon her career as a beauty at an Indian station. On the whole, we prefer the Irish scenes, to the Indian ; but both are described with much liveliness, and make sufficiently good reading. The story is told in the auto- biographical form, a form which it is not easy to manage well. The author contends with this difficulty successfully, and is always natural and easy. Some of her characters, especially the old colonel and his wife, who give Miss Neville her Indian home, are very pleasantly drawn. So is the lively Mrs. Vane, who plays the part of a chorus, and accompanies the action of the story with admirable comment and ad- vice.—A Maid Called Barbara. By Catharine Childar. 3 vols. (Hurst and Blackett.)—Miss Childar has certainly succeeded in making her heroine an attractive young person, who keeps the sympathies of a reader, even when she takes the perilous step of losing her heart to a second lover while she is still engaged to the first. The author, indeed, shows no little skill in the management of this part of her tale. There is real dignity and pathos in the story of her heroine at this crisis of her life. She has just written the letter that dismisses her lover ; then comes the news of his dangerous illness, caught while he is attending on the sick, and she is in an agony of self-reproach. She finds that a lucky accident has delayed the despatch of the letter, and she regards the incident as a divine help to making effective her repentance. We shall not spoil Miss Childar's story by revealing its plot any further. Let it suffice to say that things are brought round, though not without some ingeniously contrived suspense, to what they should be. The story is a good one, and it is well told. The scenes in Florence, with the picture of the life of the English colony there, are particularly good. The writer, too, gives frequent proof of a gift of quiet humour. The only fault that we are dis- posed to find in the book is ono which springs from the conventional necessity of lengthening it into three volumes. There is a little too much of it ; things are put in which might well have been spared,— e.g., a quite general description of sunrise, a propos of nothing in par- ticular, in Vol. II., p. 161. But there is nothing which will seriously interfere with a reader's pleasure.—Miss Standish and By the Bay of Naples. By A. E. N. Bewicke. 3 vols. (F. V. White and Co.)— There is nothing remarkable in the first of these two stories. It is fairly well told, and sufficiently interesting. But ie not Miss Bewicke a little confused, when she gets to speak of women's rights and wrongs? "Think, Marian," cries her heroine, "of the women strug- gling to earn a living for their children, and unable, because of the Factory Acts !" She denounces, it will be seen, laws which were made in the interests of women, because they were not able, it was thought, to take care of themselves under a system of free con- tract. This is intelligible enough. It is the theory, we suppose, of the advanced advocates of women's rights. But it is surely most unreasonable to go on, as the heroine does, and clamour for all kinds of protection for women, for protection even against the in- equalities of natural law. The other story is, we are bound to say, of a most objectionable kind. The plot turns upon the hideous com- plication of a man in love with the daughter of a woman whom he has seduced. Miss Bewicke doubtless thinks to serve high moral ends by introducing these horrors ; but she is making a grievous mistake. David Easterbrook : an afford Story. By Tregelles Polkioghorne. (Hodder and Stoughton.)—What can prompt a writer who, to all appearance, knows very little of Oxford, to write an "Oxford story " ? He goes astray in things great and small. The present writer has dined in many college halls, but he never saw in any one of them the "beer bottles" which the hero saw, among many elements of con- fusion, at his first visit to the hall of his own college. Further, the present writer knows something of University discipline, but he never heard of Professors making reports, either favourable or unfavourable, to the Heads of Colleges about the progress of Undergraduates. The whole story is crude in colouring. As a story, in fact, it is of very small merit indeed. The writer shows at his best when be becomes rhetorical. In chapter aid., for instance, there is writing of some force about the predominance of evil in the world.
Previous page
