SOURCE: "Heroines of Miss Ferrier, Mrs. Opie, and Mrs. Radcliffe," in Heroines of Fiction, Vol. I, Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1901, pp. 79-89.

In the following excerpt, Howells describes Opie's work as being allied to the nature school of writing and as achieving its effects through great imaginative inventiveness and the inclusion of extraordinary accidents.

[Daniel] Defoe, [Samuel] Richardson, [Oliver] Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen: this is the lineage of the English fiction whose ideal is reality, whose prototype is nature. To this illustrious company there are others worthy to be added, especially that Miss Susan Edmondstone Ferrier, who wrote Marriage, Inheritance, and Destiny, and whom [Walter] Scott praised with his habitual generosity, and grouped with Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as having "given portraits of real society far superior to anything" men had attempted. The more voluminous Mrs. Amelia Opie may be named with the others...