That Other Woman. By Annie Thomas (Mrs. Pender Cudlip). 3
vols. (F. V. White and Co.)—This is a work to make the judicious grieve. Mrs. Pender Cudlip has been before the public for about a quarter of a century; and though we have had no story from her pen entitling her to more than a respectable place among novelists of the second or third rank, she has written several books which, in virtue of their workmanlike construction and vivacious style, can be read with pleasure, if not with any special profit. There is certainly no profit to be derived from this record of the doings and misdoings, the adventures and mis- adventures, of a bigamist in good society ; and the tale can hardly give pleasure to any one but the inveterate novel-devourer, who is satisfied with every book which will kill the time for him, and is indifferent to the presence or absence of probability and congruity. In the mere wickedness of Mr. Phillipps-Twysden, the villain of the story, there is nothing incredible; but Mrs. Pender Cudlip's aim has evidently been to draw the portrait of a man who is both wicked and clever, and this cultivated and cold-blooded scoundrel displays such an amount of idiocy in the carrying out of his nefarious designs, that the author's ingenuity is taxed to the utmost to save him from detection for a single week. The story, ridiculous as it is, is not deficient in a certain briskness ; but it was not worth writing, nor is it worth reading.
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