Healey: a Romance. By Jessie Fothergill. (Henry S. King and
Co.)—"Ughtred Earnshaw " sounds like a revival of Wuthering Heights," and the scene amid which the estimable, but not interesting individual who bears that unpleasant name lives and moves is not unlike the milieu of "Shirley." Miss Katharine Healey is a good deal after the fashion of "Jane Eyre,"—she is small, plain, strong-minded, and has her own and other people's business to attend to. We are bound to take the author's word for it that llea/ey—a very ill-chosen title—is " a romance," but it is not a bit like one. It is an ordinary novel ; there are scores like it in Mr. Mudie'e list ; the romantic element
is not particularly strong, and feelings are written about rather than infused into the incidents. It is nicely written, in good English, and there is nothing objectionable in it. The author means Wilfrid Healey to be a brute, but she does not make him one ; and indeed, her chief mistake is in endeavouring to depict the seamy side of human nature at all. She is much more at home among its decencies, its amenities, and its gentle sentiments. A ruffianly, ranting preacher, named Crier, in the story, is a mere caricature ; but the heroine, Katha- rine, and her brother's secretly-married, ill-treated young wife, are very well drawn. The plot is rather straggly, and the book strikes us as a first attempt, promising better things hereafter.
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