’Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss
     Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the
     world, has read every one of them.’

After all, human nature is constant, independent of time; and fashions social, mental, literary, return like fashions in feminine headgear!  Two club women were coming from a city play house after hearing a particularly lugubrious drama of Ibsen’s, and one was overheard exclaiming to the other:  “O isn’t Ibsen just lovely!  He does so take the hope out of life!”

Yet the tendency of eighteenth century fiction, with its handling of the bizarre and sensational, its use of occult effects of the Past and Present, was but an eddy in a current which was setting strong and steadily toward the realistic portrayal of contemporary society.

One other tendency, expressive of a lighter mood, an attempt to represent society a la mode, is also to be noted during this half century so crowded with interesting manifestations of a new spirit; and they who wrote it were mostly women.  It is a remarkable fact that for the fifty years between Sterne and Scott, the leading novelists were of that sex, four of whom at least, Burney, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Austen, were of importance.  Of this group the lively Fanny Burney is the prophet; she is the first woman novelist of rank.  Her “Evelina,” with its somewhat starched gentility and simpering sensibility, was once a book to conjure with; it fluttered the literary dovecotes in a way not so easy to comprehend to-day.  Yet Dr. Johnson loved his “little Burney” and greatly admired her work, and there are entertaining and without question accurate pictures of the fashionable London at the time of the American Revolution drawn by an observer of the inner circle, in her “Evelina” and “Cecilia”; one treasures them for their fresh spirit and lively humor, nor looks in them for the more serious elements of good fiction.  She contributes, modestly, to that fiction to which we go for human documents.  No one who has been admitted to the privileges of Miss Burney’s Diary can fail to feel that a woman who commands such idiom is easily an adept in the realistic dialogue of the novel.  Here, even more than in her own novels or those of Richardson and Fielding, we hear the exact syllable and intonation of contemporary speech.  “Mr. Cholmondeley is a clergyman,” she writes, “nothing shining either in person or manners but rather somewhat grim in the first and glum in the last.”  And again:  “Our confab was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. King,” or yet again:  “The joke is, the people speak as if they were afraid of me, instead of my being afraid of them....  Next morning, Mrs. Thrale asked me if I did not want to see Mrs. Montagu?  I truly said I should be the most insensible of animals not to like to see our sex’s glory.”  It is hard to realize that this was penned in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty years ago, so modern is its sound.