resent day, poor girls, who, if they were dependent upon
their personal resources, would never acquire an education, have wider
facilities than were enjoyed by the women of the aristocracy a century
earlier.

Of those who promoted the secondary education for girls, perhaps no
name among female educators in England stands higher than that
of Frances Mary Buss. Her splendid powers of organization and
administration raised to such a degree of efficiency the private
school which she had established in the north of London, that, when
the Brewers Company desired to invest a sum of money for the education
of girls, it entered into negotiations with Miss Buss and acquired her
establishment, retaining her as head mistress.

Voluminous as are the works of women in the realm of fiction, it is
nevertheless a field little exploited by them until recent years. In
the eighteenth century the sex had produced few historians, poets,
or essayists who could be compared with the group of romance writers
which included such names as Catherine Macauley, Eliza Haywood,
Elizabeth Carter, Fanny Burney, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Radcliffe; but
when we pass to the nineteenth century, while women as romanticists
are more prominent than women as authors in any other field, there is
no limit upon the versatility which they exhibit, and all branches
of literature have felt their moulding impress. To take the names of
women out of the list of authors of the nineteenth century would be to
diminish the glory of the literary skies by blotting out the lustre of
some of its brightest constellations.

Beginning with Jane Austin and continuing to Mrs. Humphry Ward, the
line of literary descent in the realm of fiction is a roll of honor
for womankind; but it is a far cry from these to that earliest of
women novelists, Mrs. Aphra Behn, who, at the direction of Charles
II., wrote her novel _Oronooko_, the purpose of which was not
dissimilar to the social end which Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had
in mind in her _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Thus, the sixteenth century is
brought into touch with the nineteenth, although the connecting links
were few and slight until the middle of the latter. The number of
women novelists indicates that women have found in fiction the line of
literary pursuit which is most agreeable to their tastes and adapted
to their natures. There seems to be absolutely no limit to the range
of subjects which women are capable of working up in romance; w