Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 31

DEFOE, Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen: this is the lineage of the English fiction whose ideal is reality, whose prototype is nature. To this illustrious company there are others worthy to be added, especially that Miss Susan Edmondstone Ferrier, who wrote ''Marriage", "Inheritance," and "Destiny," and whom Scott praised with his habitual generosity, and grouped with Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as having "given portraits of real society far superior to anything " men had attempted. The more voluminous Mrs. Amelia Opie may be named with the others for the effect of nature which she secondarily achieved in her characters when primarily seeking the improvement of her readers. She was extolled by the highest criticism in the first quarter of the century for qualities that do not now appeal from her novels, but many of her tales can still be read with amusement, and with a sense of the helpless allegiance to life which her hyper-ethicized art could not withhold.