The position of her father, the Hon. T. L. Murray-Prior, as a member of the Legislative Council, brought her into contact with those political and vice-regal circles of which she has given entertaining and occasionally derisive accounts in Policy and Passion, Miss Jacobsen’s Chance, and elsewhere. Her description in the former story of the wealthy landowners, who adopt a passive and somewhat disdainful attitude towards party strife, applies to a class already large in the colonies. Whether such an attitude is consistent with ‘the truest conservatism to be found in Australia,’ which they are said to represent, may be questioned. It seems rather to indicate selfishness, petulance, and lack of patriotism.
It is not, however, upon the business of politics or the humours and makeshifts of colonial life that Mrs. Praed has expended her best efforts as a writer. Some study of [p 241] the human emotions is the primary interest in all her novels. There is nearly always love of the passionate and romantic kind, prompted on the one side by impulse, ignorance or glamour, and on the other by passing fancy or self-interest: the love of an innocent, unsophisticated woman for a man experienced in the pleasures and some of the darker vices of life; and, in contrast, the blunt respect and devotion of the typical Australian man for the same woman, and her light estimate of his worth. The tragedies of marriage—the union of the refined and imaginative with the coarse and commonplace, the high-souled with the worldly and cynical, the pure with the impure—are correlative themes of some of the strongest of the novels. In these, pathos is the prevailing tone. We have the spectacle of the woman’s blind, illogical trust abused, her helplessness in self-inflicted misery, or the tenacity with which, in temptation, she clings to the safeguards of conventional morality. In most cases this tenacity, which the author accounts an instinct rather than a virtue, is [p 242] either allowed to triumph, or is placed by death beyond the possibility of a supreme test. In the loves of Hester Murgatroyd and Durnford in The Head Station, of Mrs. Lomax and Leopold D’Acosta in The Bond of Wedlock, and of Mrs. Borlase and Esmé Colquhoun in Affinities, it is the woman who directly, or by implication, insists upon respect of the marriage tie so long as it remains a legal obligation.
But it should be made clear that Mrs. Praed is not in any sense a propagandist on the subject of marriage. She illustrates, often impressively, its difficulties and anomalies, but leaves the rest to the judgment of the reader. The romantic, ignorant girl who marries on trust, or is ready to do so, has numerous representatives in these novels. Though it is a woman’s view of her trials and unhappiness that is given, there is nothing in the shape of a crusade against male vices. It is not the faults of men that are dwelt upon so much as the inevitably lenient, the pitifully inadequate estimate which women make of men themselves.
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The most striking illustration of this feature is probably contained in the last scenes of The Bond of Wedlock, where the heroine learns at once the hypocrisy of her father and the dishonour of her lover. The father, in a fit of resentment, has revealed the mean plot by which she has been enabled to divorce her husband and marry Sir Leopold D’Acosta. The latter, seeing that Mrs. Lomax would never consent to an elopement, has paid another woman—a former mistress of his—to incriminate Harvey Lomax, while the audacious old humbug, his father-in-law, does the business of a detective. Ariana’s dream of happiness is dissipated. She hardens into indifference. The revelation completes the disillusionment which had already begun. ‘I had set you up as my hero, and my ideal, and I have found you—a man.’ This is the summary of her life’s experience, which in effect is also that of Esther Hagart, Ginevra Rolt, Christina Chard, Ina Gage, and others in the list of Mrs. Praed’s unhappy heroines. Married life, as they illustrate it, is usually a [p 244] compromise. Even that of Mrs. Lomax is not quite a failure. Her husband does not attempt to conceal the fact that she no longer interests him, but with that commonly-accepted philosophy which recognises a wife as at least an adjunct to conventional respectability, he reminds her that, after all, their union has some advantages:
‘I would much rather have you for a wife than any other woman I ever knew; and if I sometimes think a man is better who hasn’t a wife, it is only when you are in one of those reproachful moods, and seem as if you were anxious to make me out a heartless sort of miscreant. In Heaven’s name, why not make the best of things? Why need we be melodramatic? We are man and woman of the world. We must take the world as we find it, and ourselves for what it has made us.’
Ariana’s answer was given later on when she realized the full extent to which she had been self-deluded: ‘I am not going to be melodramatic. We can be very good friends on the outside. We need never be anything more.’
A strong bias towards analysis is the chief characteristic of Mrs. Praed’s studies in [p 245] character. As in her illustrations of the perplexing uncertainties of married life it is the woman’s point of view that is most impressively presented, so in each story there is at least one woman whose personality stands out in pathetic relief and claims paramount attention. She is usually a cultivated woman of romantic tendency, living in a restricted social environment, and displaying the craving of that class of her sex for change, pleasurable excitement, and sympathy. In the satisfaction of her yearnings or ambitions are seen, perhaps more often than is typical, the gloomy aspects of marriage, and the incompetence of women to manage their own lives.
The average Australian girl of real life is neither very romantic nor fastidious. She is cheerful, adaptable, too fond of pleasure to be thoughtful, and has a decided inclination towards married life. Its material advantages and status attract her—and, for the rest, she has a vague confidence that everything will come right. Nowhere is the horror of elderly spinsterhood more potent. The influence of [p 246] independent professional life fostered by the large public schools is still infinitesimal.
The type upon which Mrs. Praed has bestowed her most elaborate work belongs to a class both higher and far fewer in numbers. It is the class that Mr. Froude had chiefly in view when he noted the absence of ‘severe intellectual interests’ as a deficiency of society at Sydney.
Honoria Longleat, the principal study of Mrs. Praed’s second novel, may, with a few obvious deductions, be taken as a fair example of the colonial woman educated beyond sympathy with her native surroundings, and unprovided with any employment for her mental energies. With the distractions and interests of her narrow circle exhausted, and the knowledge that her future—her only possible future—must soon be decided by marriage, she is consumed with an intense and reckless desire for new emotional experience. Her unrest is like that of the large class of American women who are educated above the purely commercial standard of their fathers and brothers, and are impelled to satisfy their [p 247] intellectual cravings by frequent European travel.