"Mr. Manville Fenn has the gift of not only seeing truth, but of drawing it picturesquely. His portrait of Mahme Nousie is faithful as well as touching. Like all her race she is a being of one idea, and that idea is her child. To keep her away from the island, to have her brought up as a lady, it is for this that Nousie has opened a cabaret for the negroes and has sat at the receipt of custom herself. Of course she never once thinks of the shock that the girl must undergo when she is plunged suddenly into such a position, she never thinks about anything but the fact that she is to have her child again. Her gradual awakening, and the struggles of both mother and daughter to hide their pain, are finely told. So is the story of how they both remained 'faithful unto death.' History has a power to charm which is often lacking in tales of higher pretensions."—Saturday Review.
THE IDES OF MARCH.
By G. M. Robins.
"'The Idea of March' is a capital book. The plot does not depend for its interest upon anything more fantastic than an old gentleman's belief that a family curse will take effect unless his son marries by a given date. The complications which arise from this son's being really in love with a girl whom he believes to have treated his friend, Captain Disney, vary badly, and getting engaged to another girl, who transfers her affections to the same Captain Disney, are skilfully worked out, while the dialogue is, in parts, extremely bright, and the description of the founding of the Norchester branch of the Women's Sanitary League really funny."—Literary World.
"'The Idea of March,' in spite of its classical name, is a story of the present time, and a very good one, full of lively conversation, which carries us merrily on, and not without a fund of deeper feeling and higher principal."—Guardian.
PART OF THE PROPERTY.
By Beatrice Whitby.
"The book is a thoroughly good one. The theme is fairly familiar—the rebellion of a spirited girl against a match which has been arranged for her without her knowledge or consent; her resentment at being treated, not as a woman with, a heart and will, but as 'part of the property'; and her final discovery, which is led up to with real dramatic skill, that the thing against which her whole nature had risen in revolt has become the one desire of her heart. The mutual relations each to each of the impetuous Hedge, her self-willed, stubborn grandfather, who has arranged the match, and her lover Jocelyn, with his loyal, devoted, sweetly-balanced nature, are portrayed with fine truth of insight; but perhaps the author's greatest triumph is the portrait of Mrs. Lindsay, who, with the knowledge of the terrible skeleton in the cupboard of her apparently happy home, wears so bravely the mask of light gaiety as to deceive everybody but the one man who knows her secret. It is refreshing to read a novel in which there is not a trace of slipshod work."