TWO VETERAN NOVELISTS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1019, 7 January 1911, Page 11

TWO VETERAN NOVELISTS.

What memories are aroused by tho fact that Miss Rhoda Broughton and Miss Braddon should have each brought out..a novel iii tho last few weeks, (says a writer in the London "Times"). They are, it is true, very different writers and appeal to different publics, though at tho same timo they sharo tho affections of a considerable number of feminine readers. They are quite unlike, too, in their respectivo "output," if the commercial phrase may be permitted. Miss Braddon has now published sixty-four novels, as well as several plays, but Miss Broughton has not yet reached the round number of twenty. And . Miss Braddon- had only a little start, for "Lady Dudley's Secret" (1862) is but five years older than "Cometh Up as a Flower" and "Not Wisely, but Too Well." As ono reads the familiar titles, thero rises up a sort of vision of tho vast multitudes of girls and women who havo been profoundly moved by these two writers. Certainly they have had many men readers as well, but their most formative influence has-been on their own sex. It is impossible to estimate how much they did in their several ways to give Victorian womanhood a wider outlook and a franker view of life than thoso which belonged to tho period of horse-hair sofas and waxen fruit. And if tho modern novelist is moro freo to present life as it really is, unhampered by futile conventions, no small part of tho debt is owed to Miss Braddon and Miss •Broughton* •