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

Women Novelists of the 'Seventies 69housewife. In this fiction, at any rate, ardour for science,pure or applied, is as little manifest as the transcendental.If The Time Machine had been written in the 'seventiesits author would still, I think, have been a man. So alsowith The Return of the Native. On the other hand, neitherThomas Hardy nor Mr Wells was the author of JaneAusten's novels or of Villette.Voteless, 'unskilled', man-dependent though the womenof the 'seventies were, there is surprisingly little ofLamentations and of Ecclesiastes in their fiction. Its liveliestinterest is in human beings as social creatures ratherthan as pilgrims of eternity. Revolt was in the air—if avery partial and unmethodical survey be a safe guide—but extraneous 'purpose' seems to have been rare, andstill more rare, challenge and battle-cry. For the mostpart these novelists were eager, absorbed, diligent recorders.They were assured of what they believed in. Theywere happy in the company of their characters and delightedin merely telling a story, though even that simpleand seductive achievement cannot but involve a gooddeal of ' life' in solution.The ghost drifts or shambles in; the psychic intrudes.But the effect of the spectral in Rhoda Broughton'sTwilight Stories is a little deadened by the terse postscript,'This is a fact'. Mrs Oliphant's solemn andmemorable A Beleaguered City was of 1880. But nowhereapparent in this fiction is man's peculiar inclinationto regard an infinite (or finite) universe as though itwere a concatenation of miracles, or an over-populatedmousetrap, or an ' unweeting' machine, or an excruciatingjest. One becomes conscious of a vague difference in intention,in the views given of life, and in what one mostwants in it. There is more wit and irony than humour.Fantasy finds small place in it, and there is nothing—unless unintentionally—grotesque. The smart, the self-