The Diary of an Actress. With an Introduction by the
Rev. H. C. Shuttlevvorth. (Griffith, Ferran, and Co.)—This diary, Mr. Shuttle. worth assures us, is "a plain record of real life." The writer says, "I have been looking over the pages of an old diary kept during the early years of a very toilsome provincial experience." It is these pages that have been printed, "nothing being added and little cur- tailed." This, indeed, constitutes their value. They have not, it is evident, been in the least made up in a literary sense. They are full of repetitions, which would be wearisome did they not exactly reproduce a life that was really led, and that happens to be a life about which we would gladly know the exact truth. The writer gives as no explanation of how she came to be an actress ; but we may gather from her allusions that she had been "stage-struck," and had, against the advice of her friends, resolved to follow the profession of the stage. At the time the story opens, she has had some experience, and is employed in looking for engagements. Her disappointments, letters without number written to managers and agents and written in vain: engagements that come to nothing, or worse than nothing, a week of hard work being followed by the fruitless vigil on Saturday to an empty treasury,—such are the experiences that form the main staple of this record of daily life. It is photographic in its minuteness and accuracy ; and photographs are not always pleasing. The darkest thing in the picture is the way in which this solitary woman was assailed with wicked offers by men who had what is called a respect- able position in society. This points to a great evil in our social life, an evil which seems almost beyond remedy as long as virtuous women are so lenient to profligate men, and so cruel to their victims.
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