STUDIES IN LITERATURE.
Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century. By Marjory A. Bald. (Cambridge University Press. 10s. 6d.)
This volume does not examine the contribution made by women to nineteenth-century literature ; it is simply a number of studies of the outstanding women writers, Jane Austen, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Mrs. Brown- ing, and Christina Rossetti. Miss Bald's critical method is what might be called the " personality " method, the object of which is to explain the personality of a writer by means of his or her work. The result in this instance is of particular importance, because the critic is a woman dealing with women writers. It is a very painstaking and thorough piece of criticism, the work of a mind at once acute and sensitive. The studies are not all of equal value. The one on Jane Austen is rather short, and as it happens that so many critics of the first rank have written about her, Miss Bald's study strikes one as being somewhat below the level of the rest of the volume. The longest and perhaps most valuable study is that of Mrs. Gaskell, whose versatile genius fully engages Miss Bald's attention for some sixty pages. Mrs. Gaskell is probably one of the underrated novelists of the century, and Miss Bald's discriminating but enthusiastic essay should do something to restore the balance. The remainder of the book falls somewhere between these two extremes, though we think that the author handles fiction more surely than she does poetry. A word of praise is due to the chivalrous publishers, who have enshrined all these women writers in one of the prettiest books we have seen this season.
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