peculiar environment.
Charlotte Bronte's _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a thrilling story, which
centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century
heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of
sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly
gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike _Jane Eyre_,
Emily Bronte's powerful novel, _Wuthering Heights_ (1847) is not
pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative
interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had
humanized _Wuthering Heights_, it could have been classed among the
greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art,
had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler
than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Bronte of her
sister Emily.

Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of
fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose
best-known work is _The Last Days of Pompeii_; Elizabeth Gaskell
(1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ (1853) is an inimitable picture of
mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony
Trollope (1815-1882), whose _Barchester Towers_ is a realistic study
of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs
the blood in _Westward Ho!_ (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen;
Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of _The Cloister and the Hearth_
(1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life;
R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose _Lorna Doone_ (1869) is a
thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part
of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose _The Little
Minister_ (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story,
the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles
north of Edinburgh. His _Sentimental Tommy_ (1896), although not so
widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story
of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with
merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some
distinctive merit.

The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for
the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through
public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a
widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common
among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The