She is never so childlike as when she imagines she is most daring. And the charm of the book is its excessive femininity. What she says, even when not absolutely absurd, may be of little importance; but her feeling is so genuine and strong as to merit respect and attention. THROUGH FIFTY YEARS. THE ECONOMIC PROGRESS OF WOMEN. _November, 1900._ Looking back fifty years for the best picture of the middle-class woman’s outlook on life, spreading itself before her after some startling shock of reality, none seems to me so true and so vivid as Caroline Helstone’s vision of her own future given in “Shirley.” The book appeared in October, 1849. Although not so instinct with the flame of genius as “Villette,” yet in some respects “Shirley” is Charlotte Brontë’s greatest work. Her other novels present life only as it appeared to an exceptional woman cut off by what was in those days called the “dependent situation” of a governess from wholesome relations with those about her. Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe are the morbid products of life in institutions, and Charlotte Brontë, to whom family life was an imperative necessity, was fully conscious of their abnormality. In “Shirley” we have a broader, more sympathetic, in every way saner treatment of men and women. And the protest against the unnecessary tragedy of women’s lives comes not from the passionate egotist of the schoolroom, but from the most lovable, perhaps the only lovable, woman in Charlotte Brontë’s books. “I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest. Nobody,” she went on--“nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are, and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now.... Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood--the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions; they have something to do; their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish--the sole aim--of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule: they don’t want them; they hold them very cheap.