FICTION.
A FOOL IN HER FOLLY.• Tars posthumous novel of Miss Broughton helps in part a least to explain how it came about that so brilliant and well equipped a writer lost her public in the last twenty years of her life. This loss in vogue was, we take it, due to the fact that she earned with mid-Victorian readers a reputation for audacity which left out of account her more solid qualities, and that, as always happens, she was soon distanced by more strident apostles of indecorum. Rigorous parents and guardians placed her books on the domestic index, along with Guy Livingstone and the early Ouida, as works of a supposedly lurid nature. Miss Broughton retained her vivacious style to the end : it is agree- ably manifest in A Fool in her Folly, but the matter of her later novels was less exhilarating. She was never prone to happy endings, but from the 'nineties onward her stories were almost unintermittently studies in disillusion, and this is no exception. Apart from the minute and careful pictures which it gives of life in a country vicarage some sixty years ago, the interest is largely autobiographic. The crucial episode—the premature efforts at authorship of the heroine and the awful explosion it produced, leading to the destruction of her MS. and her expulsion from the family circle—is only a variant on the often told and, ao doubt, freely embellished story of the reception of her own first story. The sequel—in which theheroine endeavourato trans- late her own theories of life into fact, is deceived and disillusioned returns and is reconciled to her parents—deviates still further from correspondence with fact, since the heroine resigns her literary aspirations and marries a commonplace husband. The story ends with Charlotte's return to her home, with the hopes of insurgent youth irrevocably shattered. It is supposed to be written sixty years later and ends on a note of sadness: " I am eighty years old, and there is nothing loft for me but to die. I hope that I shall do it decently." It would be a great mistake to read a personal application too closely into this valediction. As Mrs. Belloc Lowndes remarks in her preface, the writing of books was only a part of Rhoda Broughton's life. In fifty years she only produced twenty novels, which would be considered a very meagre " output " by some of our industrious manufacturers of fiction. But she led a life of great social activity, and had a genius for friendship which she kept in good repair by correspondence. Her conversation was wittier and more caustic than her books, and her letters were perhaps beat of all. Mrs. Belloc Lowndes is right In calling her a great Victorian, but to bracket her with Trollope because they wrote about the same class of people is a disputable assertion ; their points of view were widely different.
• d Fool to her l'eiy, By Rhoda Broughton. London ; Mama PM% LW: sot.) One After Another. By Stacy Aumonier. (Hutchinson and Co. 7s. 6d. net.)—Mr. Stacy Aumonier gives his readers in this book the same. charm of writing which distinguishes his earlier works, and especially The Querrils. The story is concerned with the two children of a virtuous publican, who both rise in the world—Laura becoming a famous violinist, and Tom, who writes the story in the first person, achieving financial success as the keeper of a curiosity shop. The plot is not nearly so interesting as the development of the characters of the diverse personages and the analysis of the psychological conditions which are produced by the stress of modern life. The illusion of success is pursued throughout the earlier part of the volume, and these are the hero's reflections' induced by listening to the playing of a true musician :- "Success has its price, Henry. A topsy-turvy and difficult world. Mr. Burwell's uncle and Laura had both set out to chase the braggart down the hill, and having started to run—they could not stop ! At that moment I even felt sorry for poor old Uncle Burwell. A long struggling, nagging life, sweatmg people and bullying and being bullied, bartering, bargaining, scheming, looking ahead, and afraid to look away in case someone snatched the bauble from his hand. On ho rushes, tripping and skipping over the boulders. The will-o'-the-wisp is here, there, and everywhere. Then suddenly a crater opens under his feet. It is too late. In that concentrated moment as he hurtles through space he realizes that all that he has struggled for is a chimera. The products of his toil merely serve to supply a braggart nephew with the wherewithal to laze and slay."
The book tends more to reflection than to entertainment, and is considerably above the usual run of modern novels.
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