THE LOVE-LETTERS OF AN ENGLISHWOMAN.
An Englishwoman's Love-Letters. (John Murray. 5s. net.)— These charming letters profess to be genuine, and to have been published after the death of the writer in accordance with "a request made under circumstances which the writer herself would have regarded as all-commanding." The letters partially reveal a tragedy which the reader is warned cannot be fully indicated "while the feelings of some who are still living have to be con- sulted." The book falls into three parts. There are letters written by the author to her lover—and never despatched— before she knew him well enough for there to be a question of marriage between them ; letters written during her engagement, many of which describe a tour in Italy ; and letters written after he had broken off the engagement and refused to see her again. These last, we are told in a note, were sent to him after her death. The book forms a complete novel in spite of an incomplete plot, and it is this very completeness which makes us doubt if any of the letters ever really went through the post. There is nothing sufficiently strange in the sentiments or facts here recorded to shake the reader's faith, but a whole tragedy comprising the heights of joy and sorrow—sorrow ending in death—is seldom run through in a few months. Real life is more apt, as Browning says, to "hang patchy and scrappy." The self-analysis of a lover belongs, perhaps, to the region of poetry rather than that of prose, but this author's prose is very good. It is polished, but not too polished to be passionate, nor too passionate to overstep natural reticence. She is sure—evidently too sure—of her lover's affection. No agonies of doubt about his feeling to her, or hers to him, ever molest her. "You have become King so quietly," she writes in one of the earlier letters intended only for herself. The portraits she gives from time to time of people she meets, of her relations, or those who are to become her relations, are clever and full of insight. Writing of his mother, who dislikes her, and would willingly break off the match, she says : "I believe she could have a great charity, that no evil doing would dismay her. 'Staunch' sums her up, but I have done nothing wrong enough to bring me into her good graces." Of the new rector's sermon she writes with somewhat studied wit : "His shepherd's crook is one long note of interrogation with which he tries to hook down the heavens to the understanding of his hearers." Some of the letters have singularly graceful and pretty endings. In one the writer -igns herself "Your most contented and happy-go-loving."
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