Contrast : a Story of Two Women. By Lady —.
(Remington and Co.)—A work ought either to be signed or wholly anonymous. A Lady Blank put forward, and yet held back, as the author of a novel, gives a touch of vulgarity to the production, but no prestige. Apart from this mistake there is a good deal to be said for Contrast. It is an exceedingly well-meant and highly-toned story, with quite a refreshingly old fashioned flavour of propriety, good-feeling, and seriousness. The author tranquilly assumes that good people, whose thoughts are pure and whose lives are useful, are the really interest- ing portion of mankind, out of whose joys and sorrows, errors and experiences, fiction, which need not be dull because it tends to edification, may fitly be constructed. Such an innovation upon the frivolous and worse than worthless " society " novels, so called, which abound in numbers that unfortunately indicate an undesirable con- dition of the public taste, is a welcome and a pleasing one. Contrast is a story of real life. The two women with whose fate it is concerned are more naturally drawn than the men who are the arbiters of their respective destinies. There is an irritating inconsistency in the author's making such a man as she describes Colonel Malcolm, apologetically, even servilely submissive to such a man as her heroine's father, and there is no ring of reality in the dialogues between them. The contrasted women are, on the contrary, realistic, interesting, and pleasing. The story is, on the whole, unusually commendable.
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