This romantic novel is really her imaginative interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew.  If she had humanized Wuthering Heights, it could have been classed among the greatest novels of the Victorian age.  She might have learned this art, had she not died at the age of thirty.  “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone,” wrote Charlotte Bronte of her sister Emily.

Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of fiction are:  Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose best-known work is The Last Days of Pompeii; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), whose Cranford (1853) is an inimitable picture of mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose Barchester Towers is a realistic study of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs the blood in Westward Ho! (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen; Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life; R.D.  Blackmore (1825-1900), whose Lorna Doone (1869) is a thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part of the seventeenth century; J.M.  Barrie (1860- ), whose The Little Minister (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story, the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles north of Edinburgh.  His Sentimental Tommy (1896), although not so widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story of imaginative boyhood.  This entire chapter could be filled with merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some distinctive merit.

The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for the unprecedented growth of fiction.  The spread of education through public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor.  The masses, however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works.  The majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.

The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to try to paint actual life as it impressed them.  Dickens chose the lower classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy, the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp, as well as the life of the great outer world.  These writers of fiction all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect.  Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.

The Trend of Poetry:  Minor Poets.—­The Victorian age was dominated by two great poets,—­Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson.  Browning showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human motives and actions.  In one line of Fra Lippo Lippi, he voices the new poetic attitude toward the world:—­