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

Women Novelists of the 'Seventies 59Bridget, by Miss Betham-Edwards, or Debenham's Vow,or The Mistress of Langdale Hall by Rosa Kettle dealingwith the domestic affections, and welcomed by the familycircle, phrases nowadays perhaps needlessly tepid ineffect. If 'I don't think Papa would mind your beingpoor,' is one extreme of the situation; 'I am quite sureMamma wouldn't mind your being a marquis,' mightwell have been the other.In The Wooing OH Mrs Alexander tells us that Maggie,her chief character, a young woman (the daughter of achemist), whose 'brave little heart' is not less endearingand delightful company than her sound little head, wasguided in a certain crisis by ' the fixed underlying feminineinstinct which has probably kept more women straightthan religion, morality and calculation put together, thetrue instinct that woman " should not unsought be won "'.A brilliant and charming man of the world having rescuedhis titled cousin from marrying her, has himself won herheart—and she, though she knows it not, his. ' She criedshame upon herself for thus casting her full heart beforea man who didn't want it....' 'That', Mrs Oliphantagreed, 'is somehow against the instinct of primitivehumanity.' So too would most of the heroines of ourperiod. Nor did the women novelists who created themcast all that was in their full hearts before the public. Thepublic had to wait awhile.That public—an otherwise extremely hospitable one—had lately been presented, though only temporarily, withPoems and Ballads, and Rhoda Broughton had not onlyskimmed its pages, but had observed its reflex in lifeitself. For Nell's sister Dolly L'Estrange, in Cometh upas a Flower (Miss Broughton's first novel, of '68), with her'passionate great velvet orbs', was, we are told, 'the sortof woman upon whom Mr Algernon Swinburne wouldwrite pages of magnificent uncleanness'. She has a