Part 12

At nineteen, Julia Collinson became the wife of Walter de Winton, Esquire, of Maedlwch Castle, Radnorshire; but after only twelve years was left a widow, with two sons and a daughter. Her life was devoted to making their home as bright and joyous as her own had been; and it was only in the loneliness that ensued on the children going to school that her authorship commenced, with a child's book called "The Lonely Island."

Later she wrote "The Valley of the Hundred Fires," tracing the habits, characters and the destiny of the family of Gateshead. The father was by this time dead, and extracts from his sermons and diary appear; but "Emily," the mother, is the real heroine of the whole narrative, and though there is so little plot that it hardly deserves the name of novel, there is a wonderful charm in the delineation. There are a few descriptions of manners and of dresses which are amusing; nor must we omit the portrait of the grandmother, Mrs. King (called Reine in the book), daughter to the governor of one of the colonies in America before the separation, with the manners of her former princess-ship and something of the despotism. She was a friend of Hannah More, a beneficent builder of schools, and produced a revolt by herself cutting the hair of all the scholars!

"The Queen of the County" relates Mrs. de Winton's experiences of elections among "the stormy hills of Wales" in the early days of the Reform Bill. "Margaret and her Bridesmaids" draws more upon invention. Each of two young girls, through the injudiciousness of her parents, has married the _wrong_ person. Margaret acquiesces too much in her husband's indolence, and when herself roused to the perception of duty tries in vain to recover lost ground. Her friend Lottie is a high-spirited little soul, determined to do her duty as a wife, but not to pretend the love she does not feel, till it has been won. She is rather provokingly and unnaturally perfect, especially as she is only seventeen, always knowing when to obey up to the letter in a manner which must so have "riled" her husband that his persistent love is hardly credible, though it shows itself in attempts to isolate her, so that she shall have no resource save himself. His endeavours bring upon him heart complaint, whereof he dies, under her tender care, though she never affects to be grief-stricken. Only, as Margaret has lost her husband about the same time in a yachting accident, Lottie refuses to listen to the addresses of a former lover of Margaret's until she is convinced both that her friend will never form another attachment and that the original passion she had inspired is absolutely dead. There is a good deal of character in the story, though overdrawn, and it has survived so as to call for a new edition.

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To her children, as well as to her many nephews and nieces, Mrs. de Winton was a charming companion-mother, always fresh, young, vigorous and as full of playfulness as the Julia who led the band of little sisters. When all her children were grown up, in 1858, she married Richard William Stretton, who had been their guardian and an intimate friend of the family, by whom he was much beloved. He died in 1868, and Mrs. Stretton followed him on the 17th of July 1878, leaving behind her one of the brightest of memories. Her books are emphatically herself in their liveliness, their tenderness, their fond enshrining of the past.

The third of our group had an even more eventless life, and, instead of letting her imagination dwell on her own past, she studied the women of past history, and realised what they must have felt and thought in the scenes where most of them figure only as names. Her father belonged to the higher professional class, and lived with his large family, of whom Anne was the eldest, at the Paragon, Chelsea, where at eight years old Anne listened to the crash of the carriages, when the Bourbons were on their return to France, and witnessed the ecstasy of London on the visit of the Allied Sovereigns after Waterloo.

With the help of masters for special accomplishments, the daughters had the best of educations, namely, the stimulating influence of their father, an accomplished man, for whom they practised their music, wrote their themes, went out star-gazing, and studied astronomy, listening with delight to his admirable reading of Scott or Shakspere; they also had the absolute freedom of an extensive library. Anne Manning was pronounced to be no genius, but a most diligent, industrious girl; as indeed was proved, for, becoming convinced during the brief reign of a good governess of the duty of solid reading, she voluntarily read from the age of fourteen ten pages a day of real, if dry, history, persevering year after year, and thus unconsciously laying in a good foundation for her future work.

For health's sake the family went into the country, where they became tenants of a tumble-down Cistercian priory on the borders of Salisbury Plain. The numerous girls, with their mother and governess, lived there constantly; the father coming down as often as his business would allow, almost always by the Saturday coach, to spend Sunday. Here the first literary venture was made, when Anne was about seventeen. It was a short dialogue on a serious subject, which a young aunt managed to get accepted in St. Paul's Churchyard; and, as Miss Manning candidly avows, was so well advertised privately by her fond grandfather that--such were the palmy days of authorship--five hundred copies brought her in a profit of L60.

The story, "Village Belles," was completed at Tenby, the Priory having become too ruinous for habitation. It was put into the hands of Baldwin and Cradock, and no proofs were sent till the whole of the two first volumes came together. It was introduced to Mr. Manning thus, "Papa, I don't know what you will say, but I have been writing a story."

"Ho! ho! ho!" was his first answer, but he afterwards said, "My dear, I like your story very much"--and never again referred to it.

Her own after judgment was that it was an "incurably young, inexperienced tale which, after all top dressing, remained but daisied meadow grass."

Sorrow came in to fill the minds of the family (to the exclusion of mere fictitious interests) in the deaths within short intervals of two of the sisters, and their mother's invalidism, ending, within a few years, in her death. After this the winters were spent by the three sisters at the Paragon, the summers in a cottage at Penshurst, their father coming down for the Sunday. Anne Manning, meantime, was pursuing studies in painting and was an excellent amateur artist. She was also a botanist, and this has much to do with her accuracy in writing details of country life and habits.

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Dates, alas! are wanting both in her own "Passages in the life of an Authoress," and in the recollections of her kind and affectionate biographer, Mrs. Batty; but it seems to have been in 1849 that her "Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell," at first written to amuse herself and her sisters, and afterwards sent to assist a brother in Australia, who was starting a local magazine, was given to the editor of "Sharpe's Magazine," then in its early youth.

It made her fame. Nobody had particularly thought of Milton in his domestic capacity before, except as having advocated divorce and made his daughters read Greek to him, and it was reserved for Miss Manning to make the wife paint her own portrait as the lively, eager girl, happy in country freedom with her brothers, important with her "housewife-skep" in her mother's absence, pleased with dress, but touched by the beautiful countenance and the sudden admiration of the strange visitor. There proves to be a debt which makes her marriage with him convenient to the father, and it is carried out in spite of the mother's strong objections, alike to the suitor's age, his politics, and his puritanism. We go along with the country girl in her disappointment and sense of dreariness in her unaccustomed London life, in the staid and serious household, where she sorely misses her brothers and is soon condemned for love of junketing. Then come her joy in her visit to her home at Forest Hill and her reluctance to return, fortified by her father's disapproval of Milton's opinions. By the time that a visit to some wise relatives has brought her to a better mind and to yearning after her husband, Milton has taken offence and has put forth his plea for divorce, which so angers her father that he will not hear of her return; nor does she go back till after many months and the surrender of Oxford, when on her own impulse she hurries to London, meets her husband unexpectedly, and when he "looks down on her with goodness and sweetness 'tis like the sun's gleams shining after rain."

There Mary Powell's journal ends. It is written in beautiful English, such as might well have been contemporary and could only have been acquired by familiarity with the writers of the period, flowing along without effort or pedantry so as to be a really successful imitation. It crept into separate publication anonymously, and achieved a great success, being in fact the first of many books imitating the like style of autobiography; nor has it ever been allowed to drop into oblivion. It was followed up after a time by "Deborah's Diary," being the record supposed to be kept by Milton's one faithful and dutiful daughter, who lived with him in his old age.

The "fascination of the old style," as she calls it, led her to deal with "The Household of Sir Thomas More" in the person of his noble daughter Margaret. There was a good deal more genuine material here, and she has woven in the fragments from Erasmus and others with great ingenuity, and imitated the style of the fifteenth century as well as she had done that of the seventeenth.

From that time Anne Manning's books had a ready sale, though still her name did not appear. "Cherry and Violet" was a tale of the plague of London; "Edward Osborne" told of the apprentice who leapt from the window of a house on London Bridge to save his master's daughter from drowning; "The Old Chelsea Bunhouse" described the haunts with which Miss Manning was familiar; and there were other stories of country life, such as the "Ladies of Bever Hollow." All were written in the purest style, such as could only be attained by one to whom slip-shod writing was impossible, and to whom it was equally impossible not to write what was gentle, charitable, and full of religious principle.

Miss Manning was a kind friend and charming letter-writer. Her health began to fail in 1854, when she was writing for a magazine "Some Passages in the Life of an Authoress," never completed. She continued to be an invalid under the care of her sisters till her death on the 14th of September, 1879.

[Signature: C M Yonge]

DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)

_By_ MRS. PARR

DINAH MULOCK (MRS. CRAIK)

In the small circle of women writers who shed literary lustre on the early years of her present Majesty's reign was Dinah Mulock, best known to the present novel-reading generation as the author of "John Halifax, Gentleman."

To appreciate fully the position that we claim for her, it will be necessary to turn back to the period when she began to write, and see who were her contemporaries.

Pre-eminent among these stand out three names--names immortal on the roll of fame for so long as taste and critical judgment last; the books of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot must be regarded as masterpieces of fiction. We, their humble followers, bow before their genius which time, fashion, or progress cannot dim or take from; therefore, to have achieved success and to have made an abiding fame while such luminaries were shining in the firmament was a distinction to be justly proud of--the result of talent, delicacy of handling, and grasp of character that were only a little below genius.

How vast the difference that one small step would have made it is not our purpose to show; our intention is rather to take a general view of the work of a writer who--now that close upon half a century has passed, since, in 1849, timidly and without giving her name, she launched on the world her first novel, "The Ogilvies"--has never lost her hold upon the reading public of Great Britain, the Colonies, America, or wherever the English tongue is spoken.

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Dinah Mulock was born in 1826 at Stoke-upon-Trent in Staffordshire. Her disposition towards literature seems to have been inherited from her father, who was connected--but in no very prosperous way--with letters, and was known to Byron and to the poet Moore, whose fellow countryman he was. At the time of his daughter's birth, he was acting as spiritual minister to a small congregation who were followers of what were then generally thought to be his advanced and unorthodox opinions. Few who forsake the established road for their own peculiar rut find that prosperity bears them company, and the fortunes of the Mulock family during the embryo authoress's early years were unsettled and unsatisfactory. We are all given to rebel against the clouds which overcast our youth, seldom realising that to this pinch of adverse circumstance we owe much of that power to depict the sorrows, joys, and perplexities of life in the setting forth of which Miss Mulock became so eminently successful.

Before she had reached the age of twenty, she left her home and came to London, "feeling conscious," we are told, "of a vocation for authorship."

Now, in the present day, when novel writing has become an employment, profession, distraction, I might almost say a curse, there would be nothing remarkable in such a conviction; but in 1846 the mania of desiring to see their names in print had not seized upon our sex; therefore the divine afflatus must have been very strong which sent a timid attractive girl, hampered by all the prejudices of her day, to try the fortunes of her pen in London.

That she had not been deceived in her quality is shown by the success of "The Ogilvies," which not only was popular with novel readers, but raised hopes that the writer possessed great dramatic power, to be more ably used when experience had corrected the crude faults of a first book. The story, based on passionate first love, is written with the enthusiasm and vigour which comes pleasantly from a young hand, and makes us disposed to view leniently the superabundance of sentiment which, under other circumstances, we should censure. The death of the boy, Leigh Pennythorne, is rendered with a pathos which calls for admiration, and we are not surprised to see it ranked with the death of little Paul Dombey; while that of Katherine Lynedon, spoken of at the time as possessing great dramatic force, strikes us now as melodramatic and sensational.

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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 vitae_ 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!"

Criticisms in this tone make more plain to us the difficulties which novelists in the fifties had to grapple with. So many subjects were tabooed, so many natural impulses restrained, while the bogey Propriety was flaunted to scare the most innocent actions, so that nothing short of genius could ride safely over such narrow-minded bigotry. That an extreme licence should follow before the happy mean could be arrived at, was a safe prediction; but many of the writers in that day must have had a hard task while trying to clip the wings of their soaring imaginations, so that they might not rise above the level marked out by Mrs. Grundy.