N. D. Hvóschinskaya certainly was not one of those who conquer their reputation at once; but the cause of the rather hostile attitude of Russian critics towards her was that, having been born in a poor nobleman’s family of Ryazán, and having spent all her life in the province, her novels of the first period, in which she dealt with provincial life and provincial types only, suffered from a certain narrowness of view. This last defect was especially evident in those types of men for whom the young author tried to win sympathy, but who, after all, had no claims to it, and simply proved that the author felt the need of idealising somebody, at least, in her sad surroundings. Apart from this defect, N. D. Hvóschinskaya knew provincial life very well and pictured it admirably. She represented it exactly in the same pessimistic light in which Turguéneff saw it in those same years--the last years of the reign of Nicholas I. She excelled especially in representing the sad and hopeless existence of the girl in most of the families of those times. In her own family she meets the bigoted tyranny of her mother and the “let-me-alone” egotism of her father, and among her admirers she finds only a collection of good-for-nothings who cover their shallowness with empty, sonorous phrases. Every novel written by our author during this period contains the drama of a girl whose best self is crushed back in such surroundings, or it relates the still more heart-rending drama of an old maid compelled to live under the tyranny, the petty persecutions and the pin-prickings of her relations.