Woman, by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional experience, is well fitted to give expression to the emotional facts of life, and demands a place in literature corresponding to that she occupies in society; and that literature must be greatly benefited thereby, follows from the definition we have given of literature.

But hitherto, in spite of illustrations, the literature of woman has fallen short of its function, owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness—­it has been too much a literature of imitation.  To write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women, is the real office they have to perform.  Our definition of literature includes this necessity.  If writers are bound to express what they have really known, felt and suffered, that very obligation imperiously declares they shall not quit their own point of view for the point of view of others.  To imitate is to abdicate.  We are in no need of more male writers; we are in need of genuine female experience.  The prejudices, notions, passions and conventionalisms of men are amply illustrated; let us have the same fulness with respect to women.  Unhappily the literature of women may be compared with that of Rome:  no amount of graceful talent can disguise the internal defect.  Virgil, Ovid and Catullus were assuredly gifted with delicate and poetic sensibility; but their light is, after all, the light of moons reflected from the Grecian suns, and such as brings little life with its rays, To speak in Greek, to think in Greek, was the ambition of all cultivated Romans, who could not see that it would be a grander thing to utter their pure Roman natures in sincere originality.  So of women.  The throne of intellect has so long been occupied by men, that women naturally deem themselves bound to attend the court.  Greece domineered over Rome; its intellectual supremacy was recognized, and the only way of rivalling it seemed to be imitation.  Yet not so did Rome vanquish Pyrrhus and his elephants; not by employing elephants to match his, but by Roman valor.

Of all departments of literature, fiction is the one to which, by nature and by circumstance, women are best adapted.  Exceptional women will of course be found competent to the highest success in other departments; but speaking generally, novels are their forte.  The domestic experiences which form the bulk of woman’s knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of sentiment which we have already attributed to the feminine mind.  Love is the staple of fiction, for it “forms the story of a woman’s life.”  The joys and sorrows of affection, the incidents of domestic life, the aspirations and fluctuations of emotional life, assume typical forms in the novel.  Hence we may be prepared to find women succeeding better in finesse of detail, in pathos and sentiment, while men