ulation," said Novalis, "is disease." It certainly
springs from a vague disquiet. Poetry is analogous to the pearl which
the oyster secretes in its malady.

"Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

What Shelley says of poets, applies with greater force to women. If
they turn their thoughts to literature, it is--when not purely an
imitative act--always to solace by some intellectual activity the
sorrow that in silence wastes their lives, and by a withdrawal of the
intellect from the contemplation of their pain, or by a transmutation
of their secret anxieties into types, they escape from the pressure of
that burden. If the accidents of her position make her solitary and
inactive, or if her thwarted affections shut her somewhat from that
sweet domestic and maternal sphere to which her whole being
spontaneously moves, she turns to literature as to another sphere. We
do not here simply refer to those notorious cases where literature was
taken up with the avowed and conscious purpose of withdrawing thoughts
from painful subjects; but to the unconscious, unavowed influence of
domestic disquiet and unfulfilled expectations, in determining the
sufferer to intellectual activity. The happy wife and busy mother are
only forced into literature by some hereditary organic tendency,
stronger even than the domestic; and hence it is that the cleverest
women are not those who have written books.

In the later essay on "Silly Novels" her powers of sarcasm were fully
displayed. It showed keen critical powers, and a clear insight into the
defects inherent in most novel-writing. She spared no faults, had no mercy
for presumption, and condemned unsparingly the pretence of culture.
She described four kinds of silly novels, classing them as being of the
_mind-and-millinery_, the _oracular, the _white-neck-cloth_, and the
_modern-antique_ varieties. All her powers of analysis and insight shown
in her novels appeared in this article.

Severe as her criticism is, it is always just. It aims at the presentation
of a truer conception of the purpose of novel-writing, and women are
judged simply as literary workers. This criticism is based on the clearest
apprehension of why it is that women fail as novel-writers; that it is not
because they are women, but because they are fa