ous disdain characterizes the references in
the stories to conjugal relations of the ordinarily satisfactory kind.
And when those of a filial nature are brought into prominence, they,
too, often have only a pathetic or painful aspect--love on the one side
repelled by indifference; an uncouth parent offering rough sympathy that
irritates instead of soothes; a sensitive girl writhing under the
brutalities or _gaucheries_ of a drunken father.

A survey of the author's female characters will recall over a score of
names of discontented girls experimenting in life--flirts, minxes,
unhappy wives, and shallow society women; while after passing over half
a dozen of the _ingenue_, the amusing and the neutral types, there
remain only about four to represent the highest and most lovable
qualities of womanhood. A similar division might be made between the
male characters, though here the preponderance of the bad would not be
so great as in the first case.

The descriptions of English society which are amongst Mrs. Praed's best
work are marked by the same clear vision of the darker side of human
nature that is displayed in the treatment of English character in her
Australian novels. Her view of the 'smart' section of English society is
somewhat severe. After reading several of her novels, one could almost
imagine her defending her literary preference in the words of Esme
Colquhoun, in _Affinities_: 'What is our mission--we writers--but to
distil the essence of the age? The critics tell us that we are complex,
that we are corrupt, that we are anatomists of diseased minds. We reply:
The age is complex; the age is corrupt, and the society we depict is the
outcome of influences which have been gathering through centuries of
advancing civilization ... the reign of healthy melodrama is over; the
reign of analysis has commenced. We make dramas of our sensations, not
of our actions.' The same view is expressed in an article contributed by
Mrs. Praed to the _North American Review_ in 1890. 'Analysis, not
action,' she notes as the prevailing characteristic of the fiction
produced by female writers, 'as it is also of our modern social life.'
But, 'to dissect human nature under its society swathings needs,' she
adds, 'the skill of a Balzac or a Thackeray, while the feminine
counterpart of a Balzac or a Thackeray is difficult to find.'

That indefinable power which includes sympathetic insight and does not
overlook whatever is good even in the