THE PROBLEM NOVEL

SOME very fearless speaking is indulged in by Mrs. Oliphant in Blackwood, upon the subject of the problem novel. After lashing Hardy's new book, Jude the Obscure, Grant Allen's Woman Who Did, and Mrs. Dowie's Gallia, she concludes—" The object of these writers is no longer veiled over. It is plain and clear. The sex question is supposed to be a thing to be played with, laughed at, encouraged for the sake of conversation as a lively subject on which there is always something to be said ? So far as this goes, its effect already has been most unmistakable. The conversation of the drawing room is already most sensibly affected. Things are discussed freely and easily which it would a few years ago have been a shame to mention or to think of. Is this what we desire? Have we really come to the point of considering whether to kill off the children, or to drag them about the world after their mother and her lover, or lovers, is the best means of providing for their welfare? and to decide that purity is best preserved by the transfer, upon any caprice, of the bond between men and women from one to another, instead of being held fast by that steadfast union of two against all external cares and difficulties which has hitherto been the foundation of society ? If we have come so far as this, it is perhaps better that it should be fully recognised and understood. But if not, let us consider seriously what is the tendency of all this froth of literature, whether it is well to give it the force of a popular movement, and to afford our sanction, the sanction of the modest and the dutiful, to all the indecencies of a creed which puts foremost and prominent as the chief fact of life, for discussion and display, that which even the savage keeps more or less private to himself, and which the sacredness and mystery wherein the wonderful origins of life are instinctively shrouded, preserve alone from its natural resemblance to the traffic of the lower creation. We are not beasts, but men."

Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 - 1946), Saturday 15 February 1896, page 41