of their natures.
Jane is, perhaps, more angel than woman, but then a good woman who loves
is so often truly angelic with an admixture of human passion that makes
her more loveable as well as more loving than any angel ever was, that
we cannot find fault with poor Jane's perfection. In reading this book
we cannot but remark the common nature of its subject in women's novels
nowadays. The themes on which they write endless variations are the
selfishness of men, and the unselfishness of women in love. Of the men
in the women-written novels of the day, so many are plausible,
agreeable, clever, accomplished, heartless creatures; only a few escape
the general condemnation, and they are those queer creatures "women's
men"--impossible, and bores, like Daniel Deronda. The heroines, major
and minor, love devotedly. But George Eliot does not fall into the
latter blunder. For some reason she is able to see the feminine as well
as the masculine side of social and sexual selfishness. This treatment
of men on the part of the sex is remarkable, for women themselves will
admit and do admit, in unguarded moments, that there is somewhat less of
disinterestedness in this matter on woman's side than on man's. But the
point, we suppose, is this, that woman, when she does love with all her
heart, loves with a blind devotion, an exclusiveness of admiration and
of passion, and a persistency, which she demands from man, which, not
having, she doubts whether she is loved at all, and which, it must be
confessed, rare in woman, is much more rare in man, with whom indeed it
is exceptional. The truth is that man's love is as different from
woman's as his body is; but it is, therefore, none the less worth having
if she would only think so. Man is made to have less exclusiveness of
feeling in this respect than woman has. He would not be man else, nor
she woman if she were otherwise. The mistake is in her expectation of
receiving exactly the same as she gives. She has found out that she does
not get it, or does so very rarely, and the men in women's novels of the
Gifford Mohun type are one of the ways in which she proclaims and
avenges her wrongs.

--"The Barton Experiment," by "the author of 'Helen's Babies,'"[L]
cannot be called a novel--hardly a tale--and yet it is a story--the
story of a great "temperance movement" at Barton, which is supposed to
be a village somewhere at the west--in Kentucky, we should say, from
certain local references. We do n