Encouraged by having found favour with the public, Miss Mulock followed up her success with "Olive" (1850), "Agatha's Husband" (1852), "Head of the Family" (1854). Her literary reputation was now established; and, though her magnum opus, "John Halifax," had yet to be written, it may be as well to consider some of the merits and weaknesses of her style, her treatment of her subjects, and her delineation of character.
In a short sketch, such as this, it is not possible to give a synopsis of the plots of the various books, or even, in most cases, extracts from them. We have to confine ourselves to the endeavour to realise the effect they produced at the time they were written—the estimation they were then held in, and to see what position they now command among the novels of the present day.
Perhaps it will be only fair towards the faults we are about to find that we should recall the forward strides made by women in the past forty years. We who can recall the faulty teaching and the many prejudices of that date must often question if women now are sufficiently sensible of the advantages they possess.
A reviewer of Miss Mulock's novels, writing in 1866, says: "It is one of the chief misfortunes of almost every female novelist that her own education, as a woman, has been wretchedly defective;" and further on he adds: "the education of the majority of women leaves them not only without information, but without intelligent interest in any subject that does not immediately concern them." He then points out that it seems impossible for women to describe a man as he is—that they see him only from the outside. "They are ignorant of the machinery which sets the thing going, and the principle of the machinery; and so they discreetly tell you what kind of case it has, but nothing more."
Now, when the time has come that young men and maidens have other interests in common than those which spring out of flirtation and love-making, we may feel quite sure that each sex will get a better insight and have a juster knowledge of the other. The general taste for exercise, and the development of activity and health of body, has killed sentimentality and the heroines of the Rosa Matilda school. Not that these were the heroines that Miss Mulock created. Her ideals are to a certain extent made of flesh and blood, although they are not always living figures. Even at the period when we are told that "In the world of letters few authors have so distinct and at the same time so eminent a position as this lady," her judicious admirers find fault with her overflow of feminine sentimentality, which never permitted her ideal sufferers to conquer their griefs so far that they could take a practical and healthy interest in the affairs of the living world. "They live only 'for others'" says one critic, "'the beautiful light' is always in their faces; their hands 'work spasmodically' at least once in every two or three chapters."
Regarding the cramping influence of the prejudices which hedged in women in Miss Mulock's day, is it not very possible that this flaw in the portraiture of her own sex may have been due to the narrowness of her training rather than to any deficiency in her talent? Nothing more plainly shows how warped her judgment had become than many of the passages in "A Woman's Thoughts about Women." This is a book with much sound argument in it, and full of the desire to rectify the feminine grievances to which she was not blind. But when we come to a passage like the following, in which she asserts that all who "preach up lovely uselessness, fascinating frivolity, delicious helplessness, not only insult womanhood but her Creator," we ask how is this to be reconciled with the text which comes immediately after: "Equally blasphemous, and perhaps even more harmful, is the outcry about the equality of the sexes; the frantic attempt to force women, many of whom are either ignorant of, or unequal for, their own duties, into the position and duties of men. A pretty state of matters would ensue! Who that ever listened for two hours to the verbose confused inanities of a ladies' committee would immediately go and give his vote for a female House of Commons? or who, on receipt of a lady's letter of business—I speak of the average—would henceforth desire to have our courts of justice stocked with matronly lawyers and our colleges thronged by 'sweet girl graduates with their golden hair'? As for finance, if you pause to consider the extreme difficulty there always is in balancing Mrs. Smith's housekeeping book, or Miss Smith's quarterly allowance, I think, my dear Paternal Smith, you need not be much afraid lest this loud acclaim for women's rights should ever end in pushing you from your counting house, college, or elsewhere."
On this showing, such crass ignorance is to be accepted in women, and is to be taken as a matter of course and as natural to them as cutting their teeth or having measles or chicken pox. It is of little use to advocate "Self Dependence," "Female Professions," "Female Handicrafts," for those who cannot write a business letter or do a simple sum. Miss Mulock may have had, indeed I fear had, much reason to cast these reproaches at her sex. But that she did not feel their shame, and urge her sister women to strive for an education more worthy of intelligent beings, proves to me how deeply her mental gifts suffered from the cramping influence of the time in which she lived. Could she have enjoyed some of the advantages which spring out of the greater freedom of thought and action permitted in the present day, how greatly it would have enlarged her mental vision! Her male creations would have been cast in a more vigorous man-like mould. Her feminine ideals would no longer be incarnations of sentiment but living vital creatures. Where the mind is stunted the mental insight must be limited; and strong as were Miss Mulock's talents, they were never able to burst the bonds which for generations had kept the greater number of women in intellectual imprisonment.
In "Olive," the novel which immediately followed "The Ogilvies," Miss Mulock ventured on a very fresh and interesting subject. Olive, the heroine of the story, is a deformed girl, "a puir bit crippled lassie" with a crooked spine. To make this centre-character attractive and all-absorbing was a worthy effort on the part of an author, and we take up the book and settle ourselves to see how it will be done. Unfortunately, before long, the courage which conceived the personal blemish gives way, and, succumbing to the difficulties of making mind triumph over beauty, Miss Mulock commits the artistic error of trying to impress upon you that, notwithstanding the pages of lamentations over this deformity and the attack made on your sympathy, the disfigurement was so slight that no person could possibly have noticed it. Naturally this puts the heroine in a more commonplace position; and as several minor plots are introduced which Olive only serves to string together, much of the interest in her with which we started is frittered away.
Finally, Olive marries and restores the faith of a religious sceptic. And here it is curious to read the objections raised at the time against bringing into fiction "subjects most vital to the human soul." One critic, after describing the hero he is willing to accept—and, much to our regret, space prevents us showing this terrible model that we have escaped—says: "But a hero whose intellectual crotchets, or delusions, or blindness, are to be entrusted for repairs to a fascinating heroine—a mental perplexity which is to be solved in fiction—a deep-rooted scepticism which is to lose its vis vitæ according to the artistic demands of a tale of the fancy, this we cannot away with. Sceptics are not plastic and obliging. Would to Heaven scepticism could be cured by bright eyes, dulcet tones, and a novelist's art of love!"