Severe as her criticism is, it is always just.  It aims at the presentation of a truer conception of the purpose of novel-writing, and women are judged simply as literary workers.  This criticism is based on the clearest apprehension of why it is that women fail as novel-writers; that it is not because they are women, but because they are false to nature and to the simplest conditions of literary art.  These women write poor novels because they aim at fine writing, and believe they must be learned and grandiloquent.  They ignore what they see about them every day, and which, if they were to describe it in simple language, would give them real power.  It is this falsity in thought, method and purpose which is so severely condemned.  And it is the very justness of the criticism which makes it severe, which gives to a true description of these novels the nature of a stinging sarcasm.  That these women are praised by the critics she justly regards as a sure indication of their incapacity, or a sign of man’s chivalry towards the other sex, which does not permit him to speak the truth about what he knows to be so false and immature.  She also sees that what women need is to be told the truth, and to be compelled to accept the just consequences of their work,

The standing apology for women who become writers without any special qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation.  Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry.  But society, like “matter” and her Majesty’s Government, and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise.  Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three who write from vanity; and besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances.  “In all labor there is profit;” but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labor than of busy idleness.

Happily we are not dependent on argument to prove that fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men.  A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;—­novels, too, that have a precious specialty, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience.  No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements.  Like crystalline masses, it may take any form and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—­genuine observation, humor and passion.  But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing