silently demanded of them, that we can never know all the tragedies that took place.  In exceptional cases, indeed, they gave a sign.  When they possessed unusual power of intellect, or unusual power of character and will, they succeeded in breaking loose from their cages, or at least in giving expression to themselves.  This is seen in the stories of nearly all the women eminent in life and literature during the nineteenth century, from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards.  The Brontes, almost, yet not quite, strangled by the fetters placed upon them by their stern and narrow-minded father, and enabled to attain the full stature of their genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are representative.  Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning’s aid she secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained complete literary expression, is a typical figure.  It is only because we recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their own efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.

It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young women, in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are now emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated.  Critics come forward to complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to their parents, of their language, of their habits.  But there were critics who said the very same things, in almost the same words, of the grandmothers of these girls!  These incompetent critics are as ignorant of the social history of the past as they are of the social significance of the history of the present.  We read in Once a Week of sixty years ago (10th August, 1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at “the young ladies who talk of ‘awful swells’ and ‘deuced bores,’ who smoke and venture upon free discourse, and try to be like men.”  The writer of this anonymous article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics, pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called “fast young ladies” in every age, “varying their doings and sayings according to the fopperies of the time.”  The question, as she pertinently concludes is, as indeed it still remains to-day:  “Have we more than the average proportion?  I do not know.”  Nor to-day do we know.