New Novels

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Date: May 11, 1895
From: Graphic(Issue 1328)
Publisher: Primary Source Media
Document Type: Article
Length: 45,904 words
Source Library: British Library

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0026 WO1_GCLN_1895_05_11-0026-043-001

"GALLIA IN " Gallia " (I vol.: Methuen and Co.), MHnie Muriel Dowie conducts her readers into much rougher and cloudier regions than were explored by "A Girl in the Karpathians." Gallia herself is not ancient France, but a girl of supremely modern England, who has been " fired and delighted " by Mill and Herbert Spencer, has studied at Oxford, and has developed sociological views of her own. She is quite capable of falling in love-indeed, she actually does so, and with so little regard to convention as to inform the object of her affections'of the fact, only to meet with a decidedly cold-blooded rejection. She has a good many theories not very capable of statebent in such a form as to combine conciseness and delicacy-such as the separation of the vocations of wife and mother. They are, perhaps, best summed up by -the man she loved, whepn he politely told her that she used her lips, shaped to make ' the most emotional moments in the world," only " to talk the flimsiest philosophy-the sociology of at schoolgirl's half-holiday." She does mrore than talk, however. With the full courage of her convictions, she leaves her heart with the man who has at. last learned to love her, and, for strictly physiological reasons, carefully and consistently thought out, marries another. She is not, one of the heroines who' object to at man's having had a past, or who holds that the two sexes ought to be judged by the same standard. On the contrary, she is at infinite pains to translate into modern verbiage the simple old adage thata reformed rake makes, or at any rate is likely to make, the best'husband. So''do extremes meet-the old and the new.. In short, "Gallia" is an almost exaggeratedly feminine novel, characterised by- a lack of worldly wisdom, and for that matter of worldly knowledge, highly creditable to its aluthor Such deficiency is quite compatible with any amount of cleverness ; and the cleverness of ' Gallia'? is beyond question. Its characters are caricatures, sometimes with and sometimes (apparently) without intention; and they seldom if ever fail to amuse. It is brightened by plenty of sharp sayings, only rather too obviously meant to shock or startletoo obviously to succeed in doing either. And the psychology-is delightfully subtle and complicated ; nearly everybody has a- trick of saying one thing, while intending -to'- mean another, really thinking or meaning a third, and thinking that they are thinking or meaning a fourth, all that the same time. Presumably the hovel is intentional satire ; if not, it is unintentional satire; and its moral is to be found at the end of the sixth chapter: " Theie are a great many Gallias in the world nowadays; and they are, for the most part, very unhappy pcople." So wce should suppose. " .E"D ON Helen F. Hetherington and the Rev. 1i. Darwin Burton ha've collaborated in a novel, entitled as...

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Gale Document Number: GALE|BA3201460682