er heard that many
women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never
heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively
founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to
Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following
a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane
exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single
modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of
undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles
things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,
as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no
writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without
seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But
when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;
and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in
her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes,
never weak in her own way--and Scott very often is. Charlotte Bronte
dedicated _Jane Eyre_ to the author of _Vanity Fair_. I should hesitate
to say that Charlotte Bronte's is a better book than Thackeray's, but I
think it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sorts
of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the
new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot's novels
were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the
fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever
have read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre will have
no doubt about my meaning. I am no idolater of George Eliot; but a man
who could concoct such a crushing opiate about the most exciting
occasion in history certainly did not write _The Mill on the Floss_.
This is the first fact about the novel, that it is the introduction of a
new and rather curious kind of art; and it has been found to be
peculiarly feminine, from the first good novel by Fanny Burney to the
last good novel by Miss May Sinclair. The truth is, I think, that the
modern novel is a new thing; not new in its essence (for that is a
philosophy for fools), but new in the sense that it lets loose many of
the things that are old. It is a hearty and exhaustive overhauling of
that part of human existence which has always been the woman's provinc