R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

54 Walter de la Marehow the wild west wind of popular opinion and capricemay sweep a fiction once alive and beloved into theseemingly lost, if not into the irrecoverable.The distance that in fiction lends re-enchantment tothe view, has indeed to be considerable. The once expensivefurniture, glass and china of the 'seventies hasas yet won only half-way to the goal of what the AmericanCustoms Officers recognise as the ' antique'. First editionsof its women novelists are in even worse case. As rankon rank, dwindling in perspective, they repose on theirmetallic shelves in the London Library and meet thefaltering eye of the enquirer, they may shed a tranquillisingcalm—but they are unlikely to be collected. Thisis no proof however that they are unworthy of being recollected.'The demon of Chronology' being in our midst, onlythe dryest statistics can suggest the actual situation. Inthe year 1875, then, when ComiN' thro' the Rye appearedand Thomas Hardy had recently published A Pair ofBlue Eyes and Far from the Madding Crowd, when Meredithwas forty-seven and Henry James thirty-two, whenMr Wells, Mr Galsworthy and Mr Bennett were not yetin their 'teens, the following novelists were more or lessengrossed in the production of fiction: George Eliot,Mrs Henry Wood, Anne Manning, Mrs Alexander, MrsOliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Yonge, CharlotteTucker, Mrs Lynn Linton, Jean Ingelow, Julia Kavanagh,Amelia Edwards, Mrs Annie Edwardes, Miss Betham-Edwards, Mrs Craik, Mrs Marshall, Mrs Hungerford, MrsRiddell, Elizabeth Charles, Harriet Parr, Hesba Stretton,Mrs Archer Clive, 'Ouida', Mary Elizabeth Braddon,Rosa Carey, Charlotte Dempster, Rosa Kettle, MrsLinnaeus Banks, Florence Montgomery, Lady AugustaNoel, Mary Linskill, Eleanor Poynter, Florence Marryat,Mary Roberts, Mrs Hibbert Ware, Mrs Robert Stuart de