No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women.  The trouble is that into the new work upon which they are just entering they have not yet brought their thoroughness to bear.  They suffer and are defrauded and are reproached, simply because they have not yet nerved themselves to do well the things which they have asserted their right to do.  A distinguished woman, who earns one of the largest incomes ever honestly earned by any one of her sex, off the stage, told me the other day that she left all her business affairs to the management of others, and did not even know how to draw a check on a bank.  What a melancholy self-exhibition was that of a clever American woman, whom I knew, the author of half a dozen successful books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face until they had got into such a tangle that not even her own referees could disentangle them to suit her!  These things show, not that women are constitutionally wanting in thoroughness, but that it is hard to make them carry this quality into new fields.

I wish I could possibly convey to the young women who write for advice on literary projects something of the meaning of this word “thorough” as applied to literary work.  Scarcely any of them seem to have a conception of it.  Dash, cleverness, recklessness, impatience of revision or of patient investigation, these are the common traits.  To a person of experience, no stupidity is so discouraging as a brilliancy that has no roots.  It brings nothing to pass; whereas a slow stupidity, if it takes time enough, may conquer the world.  Consider that for more than twenty years the path of literature has been quite as fully open for women as for men, in America,—­ the payment the same, the honor the same, the obstacles no greater.  Collegiate education has until quite recently been denied them, but how many men succeed as writers without that advantage!  Yet how little, how very little, of permanent literary work has yet been done by American women!  Young girls appear one after another:  each writes a single clever story or a single sweet poem, and then disappears forever.  Look at Griswold’s “Female Poets of America,” and you are disposed to turn back to the title-page, and see if these utterly forgotten names do not really represent the “female poets” of some other nation.  They are forgotten, as most of the more numerous “female prose writers” are forgotten, because they had no root.  Nobody doubts that women have cleverness enough, and enough of power of expression.  If you could open the mails, and take out the women’s letters, as somebody says, they would prove far more graphic and entertaining than those of the men.  They would be written, too, in what Macaulay calls—­speaking of Madame d’Arblay’s early style—­“true woman’s English, clear, natural, and lively.”  What they need, in order to convert this epistolary brilliancy into literature, is to be thorough.