MISS BRADDON'S NEW NOVEL.*
Miss BRADDON, moved perhaps by the incessant criticism upon "sensation "stories, and the low rank in the world of art to which they stand condemned, has changed her policy, and tried her hand at a regular novel of character. The motive of the Doctor's Wife is the display of a single and not very exceptional mind under the influence of circumstances which if infrequent are neither im- possible nor so outré as to be beyond the range of the ordinary reader's sympathy. There is of course a criminal of the vulgar sort mixed up with the story, and there is also of course a murder, but neither villain nor crime have any real influence upon the tale, the whole interest of which centres in the mental condition of its heroine—the inner life of a girl gifted or cursed with a romantic imagination, but whose outer surroundings are of the most ordinary kind. We are bound to say that in her new walk Miss Braddon has displayed quite unexpected power, that she can create a female character ordinary and yet bizarre, analyze her emotions with delicate skill, and display her action in inci- dents each of which is a surprise, yet on reflection is pronounced by the reader accurate and natural. The habit of using too many words which belongs to all the higher sensation novelists —they having to protract the suspense without employing too many incidents—clings to her still, but it is the only visible defect of a book likely to introduce Miss Braddon into houses where her novels have hitherto not been seen.
The heroine of the tale, which is strictly a biographical fiction, is Isabel Sleaford, the daughter of a man whom she believes to be a lawyer, but who is really a professional forger living on the outskirts of London. Neglected by her father, worried by a shrewish mother, impatient of the sordid surroundings of her life, of messages to the cookshop and furtive errands to the pawnbroker, Isabel, a girl with strong imagination, solaces her- self with novels, lives at every leisure moment the ideal life of the heroine who last excites her interest, and, as she says, "likes that sort of unhappiness," that mixture of reverie, sympathy, senti- mentality, and discontent, which novel-reading is apt to produce among imaginative girls. The novels, it must be remembered, are of the better kind, Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer being the favourite authors, and Edith Dombey the most frequent
• TA4 Doctor's Wife. Br the Author of " Lsdy Audley's Secret" London: Mextrell. ideal. Of course her frock is not over-clean and a good deal tumbled, her hair untidy and her manner querulous, but there is some beauty in the dowdy figure, and a kind of poetry lurking in the over-heated silly imagination. She is first introduced lolling under a pear tree devouring one of her favourite stories, and the visitor "wondered how it was that her eyes looked a tawny yellow when the light shone full upon them, and a dense black when they were shaded by their dark lashes. George was not so much impressed by Miss Sleaford's beauty as by the fact that she was entirely different from any woman be had ever seen before; and I think herein lay this young lady's richest charm, by right of which she should have won the homage of an emperor. There was no one like her. Whatever beauty she had was her-own, and no common property shared with a hundred other pretty girls. You saw her once and remembered her for ever ; but you never saw any mortal face that reminded you of here . . . . Pool: Isabel's heroes were impalpable tyrants, and ruled her life. She wanted her life to be like her books; she wanted to be a heroine,--un- happy perhaps, and dying early. She had an especial desire to die early, by consumption, with a hectic flush and an un- natural lustre in her eyes. She fancied every time she had a little cough that the consumption was coming, and she began to pose herself, and was gently melancholy to her half-brothers, and told them one by one, in confidence, that she did not think she should be with them long." Or as a friend who writes penny novels, and therefore despises romance, remarks, "No wise man or woman was ever the worse for reading novels. Novels are only dangerous for those poor foolish girls whl read nothing else, and think that their lives are to be paraphrases of their favourite books. That girl yonder wouldn't look at a decent young fellow in a Government office, with three hundred a year and the chance
• of advancement,' said Mr. Smith, pointing to Isabel Sleaford with a backward jerk of his thumbs ; 'she's waiting for a melan- choly creature, with a murder on his mind."
The action of this girl, who is but a deeply shaded sketch of hundreds around us, in the different circumstances of her life constitutes the whole tale, and in describing that action Miss Braddon displays a singular and most effective moderation. Tempting as the subject is she is not once betrayed into ex- aggeration, does not once stray from the path such a creature would have been sure to tread. Isabel's father is imprisoned, and she herself becomes a governess, teaching her pupils all the imaginative bits of history—the adventures of Joan of Arc and the vicissitudes of Mary Stuart, the story of the Iron Mask and the fate of Marie Antoinette—acting occasionally before the glass, and leading always her own silly but exciting dream life. A most prosaic young surgeon, a good, heavy young man, with a decent but not rich practice, and no imagination at all, proposes to her, and the reader expects a disgusted romantic refusal. Not a bit of it. The proposal links itself into her novel-struck imagi- nation in a more natural and much more probable way :—
" Isabel listened with a most delightful complacency ; not because she reciprocated George's affection for her, but because this was the first little bit of romance in her life, and she felt that the story was beginning all at once, and that she was going to be a heroine. She felt this ; and with this a kind of grateful liking for the young man at her side, through whose agency all these pleasant feelings came to her. Did she love him? Alas ! she had no bettor knowledge of that passion than the knowledge she had gathered from her books, and that was at the best so conflicting in its nature, that it was scarcely wonderful if her resoling left her adrift upon a vast sea of conjecture. She thought that it was pleasant to have this young man by her side, beseeching her, and worshipping her in the most orthodox fashion. There was something contagious in George Gilbert's agitation to this inexperienced girl, who had not yet learned the highest lesson of civilization—utter indifference to the sensations of other people. Her hand trembled a little when he took the shy fingers timidly in his own; and she stole a glance at him, and thought that he was almost as good-looking as Mr. Hablot Browne's portrait of Walter Gay ; and that, if she had only a father to strike her and turn her out of doors, the story of her life might be very tolerable, after all. And all this time Gearge was pleading with her, and arguing, from her blushes and her silence, that his suit was not hopeless. . . . . It was so very easy for her to mistake her pleasure in the 'situation ;' the rustic bridge, the rippling water, the bright spring twilight, even the faint influence of that one glass of sparkling Burgundy, and, above all, the sensation of being a heroine for the first time in her life—it was so terribly easy to mistake all these for that which she did not feel—a regard for George Gilbert."
And so she accepts him, to find out that her life is as unlike her dreams as ever, that they have nothing to say to each other, that her new home is comfortable but stuffy, and that her hushaud thinks bright paper, and flowers, and carpets too expensive for prudent people.
It is while still in this state of weary, dreamy feeling, the curse of which accompanies a permanent jar between the inner and outer life, the full effect of never " tasting a wish realized with the bloom on," she meets Roland Lansdell, the wealthy
squire of the neighbourhood, minor poet, artist, and gentleman,. who can "talk of Shelley with her," is as it were Shelley to her.. Isabel is charmed with his- residence, the intense appetite for luxury, for colour, grace, and beauty which accompanies this kind of imagination being for once satisfied, and the two fail madly in love with one another. We confess when we came to this incident we expected the ordinary routino,—the silly woman beguiled into elopement with her idol, the premature death, and the long misery, but Miss Braddon knows her art better than this. Bringing perpetually before us her heroine's silliness, her love-sick imaginative folly, her dreams of Byron and Shelley, and reference of every incident to some overstrained scene in senti- mental novels, she makes her weaknesses her preservative. Roland Lansdell, who, we may remark, is simply a modern man of the world, with good instincts but cultivated and reflective till he can scarcely see the marking line of right and wrong, and who is madly in love with Isabel, does ask her to fly with him, and then the imagination acts for once as an antiseptic :— " Lady Gwendoline had been right, after all,—this is what Isabel thought,—and there had been no Platonism, no poet-worship on Roland Lansdoll's aide; only the vulgar everyday wish to run away with another man's wife. From first to last she had been misunderstood ; she had been the dupe of her own fancies, her own dreams. Lady Gwendoline's cruel words were only cruel truths. It was no Dante, no Tease, who had wandered by her side;' only a dissipated young country squire, in the habit of running away with other people's wives, and glorying in his iniquity. There was no middle standing-place which Roland Lana- dell could occupy in this foolish girl's mind. If he was not a demi- god he must be a villain. If ho was not an exalted creature, full of poetic aspirations and noble fancies, he must be a profligate young idler, ready to whisper any falsehood into the ears of foolish rustic woman- hood. All the stories of aristocratic villany that she had ever read flashed suddenly back upon Mrs. Gilbert's mind, and made a crowd of evidence against Lady Anna Lansdell's son. If he was not the one grand thing which she had believed him to be—a poetic and honourable adorer—he was in nothing the hero of her dreams. She loved him still, and must continue to love him, in spite of all his delinquencies ; but she must love him henceforward with fear and trembling, as a splendid iniquitous creature, who had not even one virtue to set against a thousand crimes. Such thoughts as these crowded upon her, as she leaned sobbing on the narrow wooden rail of the bridge ; while Roland Lansdell stood by, watching her with a grave and angry countenance."
We cannot quote the rest of one of the ablest scenes we ever read,—but Isabel does not fly.
We will not spoil the reader's interest by giving the rest of the story, which, though it grows more sensational, moves OD naturally to the end, but will only express our pleasure that Miss Braddon has at last contributed something to fiction which will be remembered. Our slight sketch gives only an idea of the reality, every page containing some slight touch, some one of the thousand links which bind together the heroine's active life and her life in dreamland. When her husband is ill Isabel. is lees indifferent to him, for sickness has in it always a touch of romance ; she can hardly be sorry for her father's career, there is something so romantic in being the innocent daughter of a felon. Isabel Sleaford. is a character, a human being, not like Lady Audley a beautifully modelled lay figure to be placed in wonderful attitudes, lighted up with strangely coloured lights, or hung with ghastly drapery. A little more pains, a little more time, a little more of the lovingnvs with which the author has painted single scenes, and Isabel might have belonged to that small list of heroines which is quoted in conversation as if those who composed it were real figures,—to the Flora MacIvors, and Frames and Becky Sharps,—who are to this generation more real than the great women on whom the good women who write biographies when they ought to be writing novels are so fond of descanting. There is a sub-figure in the story, a barrister who earns his living by stories for penny numbers, who is also adtnir- ably done. Ho uses up all there is in him of romance for copy Sigismand had of course only one vision,—and that was the pub- lication of that great book, which should he written about, by the re- viewers and praised by the public. He could afford to.
quietly himself ; for was he not, in a vicarious manner, going ,through more adventures than ever the mind of man imagined ? He came home to Camberwell of an afternoon and took half a pound of rump-steak and three or four cups of weak tea, and lounged about the weedy garden with the boys ; and other young men, who saw. what; his life was, sneered at him, and called him slow.' Slow, indeed ! Is it plow to ho dangling from a housetop with a frayed rope slipping thriiiiigh your hands and seventy feet of empty space below you? Is Wades, to be on board a ship on fire in the middle of the lonely Atlantic, and to rescue the entire crew on one fragile raft, with the handsomest female pas- senger lashed to your waist by means of her back hair ? Is it slow to go down into subterranean passages, with a dark lantern and hails dozen bloodhounds, in pursuit of a murderer? This was the sort of thing that Sigismund was doing all day, and every day—upon paper ;. and when the day's work was done, he was very well contented to loll in a garden-chair and smoke his cigar, while enthusiastic Isabel talked to. him about Byron, and Shelley, and Napoleon the First."
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