bedience through
three volumes to a splendid creature who is his wife, must have
something wrong about his mind. And something wrong about St. John's
mind there ultimately proves to be. It flashes across Isola that this is
the case, and before long her worst suspicions are confirmed. At last
St. John breaks out into open lunacy, and dies deranged--a fate which is
partly the cause, and partly the consequence, of his continual
indulgence in such wild theories about the relations of man and wife. It
is not every day that we have the valuable lesson of the rights of wives
so plainly or so practically put before us, but when it is put before
us, we recognize the service that may be conferred on literature and
society by lady authors. To assert the great cause of the independence
of the female sex is one of the ends of feminine fiction, just as the
assertion of the rights of plain girls is another. Authoresses do not
ask for what Mr. Mill wishes them to have--a vote for the borough, or
perhaps a seat in Parliament. They do ask that young women should have a
fair matrimonial chance, independently of such trivial considerations as
good looks, and that after marriage they should have the right to
despise their husbands whenever duty and common sense tell them it is
proper to do so.

The odd thing is that the heroines of whom authoresses are so fond in
novels, are not the heroines whom other women like in real life. Even
the popular authoresses of the day, who are always producing some lovely
pantheress in their stories, and making her achieve an endless series of
impossible exploits, would not care much about a lovely pantheress in a
drawing-room or a country-house; and are not perhaps in the habit of
meeting any. The fact is that the vast majority of women who write
novels do not draw upon their observation for their characters so much
as upon their imagination. In some respects this is curious enough, for
when women observe, they observe acutely and to a good deal of purpose.
Those of them, however, who take to the manufacture of fiction have
generally done so because at some portion of their career they have been
thrown back upon themselves. They began perhaps to write when
circumstances made them feel isolated from the rest of their little
world, and in a spirit of sickly concentration upon their own thoughts.

A woman with a turn for literary work who notices that she is distanced,
as far as success or admiration goes, by