Time has dealt unkindly with Samuel Warren: it is yet to be seen how time will deal with another popular favourite, Mrs Henry Wood1820-1887, who was born in Worcestershire and made the city of Worcester the centre of many of her stories. The "Channings" and "Mrs Halliburton's Troubles" are her best novels and they have had a well-deserved popularity, for Mrs Wood had a splendid faculty for telling a story. Her even more popular novel, "East Lynne," will probably survive for many a year as a stage play.
Next to Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot the most distinguished woman novelist of the era is Mrs Gaskell1810-1865, who, as Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister of Manchester. Mrs Gaskell's first literary success was "Mary Barton," the story of a Manchester factory girl. "Ruth," "North and South," and "Sylvia's Lovers" were equally successful, but the two books which are certain to secure immortality to their author are "Cranford" (1853), and "The Life of Charlotte Brontë" (1857). "Cranford" is an idyll of village life which is sure to charm many generations of readers, and not a few artists have delighted to illustrate its quaint and fascinating character studies. "Cranford" has been identified with Knutsford in Cheshire. Mrs Gaskell's biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë has probably had a larger sale than any other biography in our literature. Many causes contributed to this—the popularity of the Brontë novels, the exceptionally romantic and pathetic life of their authors, Mrs Gaskell's own fame as a writer of fiction, and the literary skill with which she treated the material at her command.
Other women writers who have had a large measure of fame, and are now well-nigh forgotten, are Mrs Marsh (1791-1874), who wrote "The Admiral's Daughter" and "The Deformed," Mrs Crowe (1800-1876), who wrote "Susan Hopley" and "The Night Side of Nature," Mrs Archer Clive (1801-1873), who wrote "Paul Ferroll," Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812-1885), the author of "Ann Sherwood," Mrs Stretton (1812-1878), who wrote "The Valley of a Hundred Fires."
All these are now little more than names to us, but not so Anne Manning1800-1879, whose "Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell" will long continue to be read. It is an effective presentation of Milton and his first wife. Mrs Norton1808-1877, "the Byron of poetesses," as Lockhart described her, wrote several novels, "Stuart of Dunleath" and "Lost and Saved" being perhaps the best known in their time, but she lives now mainly in George Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways." Dinah Mulock1826-1887 (Mrs Craik) may still be ranked among our most popular novelists, although her best and most successful book, "John Halifax, Gentleman," was published in 1857. The memory of Julia Kavanagh1824-1877, although her "Madeleine" was enthusiastically greeted on its appearance, has all but faded away. Miss Kavanagh's "Woman in France in the 18th Century," "English Women of Letters," and "French Women of Letters," were handsomely got-up books, and are still to be found in many old-fashioned libraries.
Two of the most popular writers for children were A.L.O.E. and Mrs Ewing. A.L.O.E. or A Lady of England, was the pseudonym of Charlotte Maria Tucker1821-1893, who after many years of successful literary labour, went out to India for the Church Missionary Society, at the age of fifty-four. Miss Tucker's most popular stories were "Pride and his Pursuers," "Exiles in Babylon," "House Beautiful," and "Cyril Ashley." Scarcely less popular was Mrs Ewing1841-1885, whose mother, Mrs Gatty, edited Aunt Judy's Magazine. It was in this magazine that Mrs Ewing's "Remembrances of Mrs Overtheway" made their appearance.
Another writer of great popularity, Mrs Charles1828-1896, secured an immense success with "The Schönberg-Cotta Family," "Kitty Trevelyan's Diary," and other books of a semi-religious, semi-historical tendency. It is a natural association, not derived from similarity of name, to mention Maria Louisa Charlesworth1819-1880 at the same time, because Miss Charlesworth's "Ministering Children" had an enormous success with the religious public of England,—the public which supports Missionary Societies and Sunday Schools.
I might easily devote many pages to the living women novelists who have impressed themselves upon the era; but that scarcely comes within the scope of this little book. There are, to name but a few, Mrs Lynn Linton, Mrs Humphry Ward, Ouida, Miss Braddon, Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Olive Schreiner, Miss Rhoda Broughton, Edna Lyall, Lucas Malet, Miss Charlotte Yonge, Miss Adeline Sergeant, Mrs Macquoid, Mrs Alexander, Mrs W. K. Clifford—names which recall to thousands of readers many familiar books and some of the happiest hours they have ever spent.
With the name of Mrs Oliphant1828-1897, who has recently died, I may fitly close this survey of Victorian fiction. Mrs Oliphant struck the note of the era alike in her versatility and in her lack of thoroughness. She was so versatile that she once offered to write a whole number of Blackwood's Magazine, a publication to which she was for years a valued contributor. And she would have done it with fair effectiveness. That she wrote good fiction is now generally acknowledged. She wrote also biography, criticism, and every form of prose. Her "Makers of Florence" has been a popular history,—it treats of Dante, Giotto, and Savonarola,—as her "Life of Edward Irving" has been a popular biography. She wrote many other books apart from her fiction, "A History of Eighteenth Century Literature," a "Memoir of Principal Tulloch," biographies of Cervantes and Molière, and a volume on "Dress." But she was not a good critic, nor was she a very accurate student. It is upon her novels that her fame will have to rest. "Salem Chapel," a skilful delineation of a minister and his congregation, has been compared to George Eliot's "Silas Marner." "Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland" (1849) was her first novel and "The Lady's Walk" (1897) her last, and in the intervening years she probably wrote sixty or seventy stories, each of them containing indications of a genius which, with more concentration, would have given her an enduring place in English fiction.
CHAPTER III
The Historians