Time Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE NOVELS OF FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. ' Mrs. Burnett's literary career Las been hitherto a career of steady advance. She began with little more than the pow... more »er of sprightly narrative, and a certain pleasant humorousness. She has gradually acquired genuine pathos, tenderness free from sentimentality, strength free from violence, and an excellent literary style. Her course has been an unvaried ascent; and we- may fairly hope that she will go on ascending. Of her first stories—republished in England without her permission—I will not speak in detail. They are brisk and rather flippant, and they are disfigured by hasty writing and by a flavour which I do not know how else to characterise than as a flavour of cheap ladies' journalism. I mention them only to note Mrs. Burnett's progress from these unhopeful beginnings to work of a completely different character. One collection of stories, however, stands on a different footing, having been, as the preface tells us, " prepared and revised for publication in book form under her own supervision." These stories, then, may fairly be regarded as Mrs. Burnett's serious beginnings, and as such deserve a somewhat closer examination. The short stories of a novel-writer have a special interest for the critic. They may be as slight as you will, but they are straws that show the way of the wind. Mrs. Burnett's volume contains eight stories, " Surly Tim," " Le Monsieur de la petite Dame," " Smeth- urstes," " One Day at Arle," " Esmeralda," " Mere Giraud's Little Daughter," " Lodusky," and " Seth "; and taking the eight together we may find in them the germs of much, perhaps of most that has followed. " Surly Tim " belongs entirely to that Lancashire life and speech which Mrs. Burnett has used in her best known novel, and though the action of " ...« less