, of Miss
Ferrier, of Mrs. Stowe, not to mention many others, are to be ranked
among the best works of fiction in any language. But while women have
contributed their full share of novels, both as regards quantity and
merit, they have also contributed much more than what we think their
full share of worthless and immoral writing. Bad women will have
literary capacity as well as bad men, but it is doubly shocking to find
that the prurient thoughts, the indecent allusions, and immoral
opinions which are often met with in the novels of the day proceed from
that sex which ought to be the stronghold of modesty and virtue.

And this matter becomes very important when we consider the position
which works of fiction have attained in the present century. In the
days of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Heywood, Fielding, or Smollett, coarseness of
thought and language was so general that it naturally had a prominent
place in novels. All persons who objected to licentious scenes and
gross expressions in the reading of themselves or their children
excluded works of fiction. As Miss Edgeworth said, most novels were
filled with vice or folly, and as Miss Burney complained, no body of
literary men were so numerous, or so little respectable as novelists.
But, in the hands of such writers as Sir Walter Scott, as Miss Ferrier,
as Miss Austen, as Dickens, as Thackeray, as Charles Kingsley, as Mr.
Anthony Trollope, the novel has achieved for itself a position of
respectability and dignity which seems to remain unimpaired,
notwithstanding the efforts of many authors to destroy it. Works of
fiction are to be found in every home, in the hands of parents, in the
hands of young boys and girls. The word novel has been given so high a
signification by the great names which are associated with it, that
parental censorship has almost ceased. It is impossible that a form of
literature to which so many and so great minds have been devoted, and
which takes so prominent a place in the favor of the reading public,
should not be without a powerful influence. Let us look more closely at
the works of fiction of the nineteenth century, and then endeavor to
determine how far their influence has been for good, and how far for
evil.

II.

It is the especial province of the novel of life and manners to be as
far as possible a truthful reflection of nature. And the more it
approaches to this condition, the more realistic it is said to be. But
the word realism is a vague