BOOKS THAT WOMEN READ.

Humor and wit do not appeal much to women (writes Lady Violet Greville in the London "Daily Chronicle"). They are apt to condemn it as nonsense. Even the gentle satire of Miss Austen leaves them cold, but the biting modern wit of "Elizabeth's Visits," or of her namesake in a German garden, meet with hearty approval. All that is psychological, mysterious, and occult seems to attract them, the so-called nice is rejected as insipid, and the nasty condoned as art. Religious novels, unless the heroine be a Freethinker, do not attract, but society novels especially please the women of country towns and seaside watering places. They take the extraordinary antics of the fine folk depicted therein for sincerest truth, just as the credulous Drury-lane audiences believe in the reality of the wicked dukes and duchesses presented to them on the stage. The slang, the extravagance, the morbid splendor, and the bad manners of these gentry delight while they appal. Readers are thus able inwardly to gloat over sensational and outrageous details, while outwardly expressing their horror and disapproval. La Rochefoucauld says "there is something in the misfortunes of our friends which does not displease us." and so the sins of society constitute a new relish to life, and leave us with an agreeable sense of Pharisaism and superiority. A touch of religious sentiment is not disliked, but it must be tinged with vulgarity and tempered with sensation, and the blend has to be mostly mixed or it is apt to pall. It is evident that taste has changed enormously since the days when Adam Bede was considered unfit for the young person. We are no longer afraid of touching pitch.The trend is towards the erotic, the untrammelled, the exaggerated. There is a want of proportion, of the sense of order, of the seemly, which is supposed to denote an advanced intelligence and a greater Catholicism of thought. The keen, delicate sense of innate taste which pervades the highest literature is neglected. Women take their fiction as they do their tea, at haphazard, hurriedly, without discrimination.

The Advertiser 25 January 1908,
[Elizabeth and Her German Garden ; Elizabeth von Arnim]