lse to nature and to the
simplest conditions of literary art. These women write poor novels because
they aim at fine writing, and believe they must be learned and
grandiloquent. They ignore what they see about them every day, and which,
if they were to describe it in simple language, would give them real power.
It is this falsity in thought, method and purpose which is so severely
condemned. And it is the very justness of the criticism which makes it
severe, which gives to a true description of these novels the nature of a
stinging sarcasm. That these women are praised by the critics she justly
regards as a sure indication of their incapacity, or a sign of man's
chivalry towards the other sex, which does not permit him to speak the
truth about what he knows to be so false and immature. She also sees that
what women need is to be told the truth, and to be compelled to accept the
just consequences of their work,

The standing apology for women who become writers without any special
qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of
occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for
the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to
bad poetry. But society, like "matter" and her Majesty's Government,
and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as
well as excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from
necessity, we believe there are three who write from vanity; and
besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact
of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind
of literature is not likely to have been produced under such
circumstances. "In all labor there is profit;" but ladies' silly
novels, we imagine, are less the result of labor than of busy idleness.

Happily we are not dependent on argument to prove that fiction is a
department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully
equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our
memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but
among the very finest;--novels, too, that have a precious specialty,
lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No
educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of
fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid
requirements. Like crystalline ma