life these were, reflecting the manners of the time,

although coarse in expression and often indelicate in incident as
they seem to the occasional reader of to-day. In 1791 "A
Simple Story " by Mrs. Inchbald had appeared, and " Nature and
Art " in 1 796. It was in 1 794 that Mrs. Radcliffe's " Mysteries of
Udolpho " was published, and that fantastic fiction had been pre-
ceded by "The Sicilian Romance" in 1790. At the time that
Mrs. Edgeworth was elaborating her tales of Irish life, Jane
Porter was inditing "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The
Scottish Chiefs" (1810) ; while Susan E. Ferrier's "Marriage"
followed in 1818, and "The Inheritance " in 1824. This was all
preparing the way, as it seems, for the appearance some years
later of the remarkable work of another woman, the " Jane Eyre "
of Charlotte Bronte; and, what is more important still, it was
possibly influential in the development of a genius which, by the
publication of " Scenes from Clerical Life," in Blackwood's Maga-
zine, in 1857, was to carry a woman's name to a place among the
novelists not only higher than that as yet attained by any of her
sisters, but so high as to endanger the laurels of all story-tellers
from Defoe's day to her own.- An honorable list, certainly, that:
of these women novelists, deserving more attention and a larger
notice than is possible here. To the best of these novelists, far
more than to Richardson and Fielding or Goldsmith, does the
present generation owe in its perfection the " novel of manners,"
so called, that realistic delineation of the affairs of common life
which forms the most popular class in the fiction of to-day.
