Two others besides George Eliot have made a single but notable contribution to this list, Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë. Rebecca Sharp is too well known to need more than appreciative mention. Shirley Keeldar is interesting as being what the author’s “sister Emily might have been.” She is a spicily sweet, lovable character, clearly presented both in action and in such touches of description as,[156] “* * * ever ready to satirize her own or any other person’s enthusiasm, she would have given a farm of her best land for a chance of rendering good service.” She converses with her friend Caroline about literature:[157] “Milton was great; but was he good? His brain was right; how was his heart? * * * Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not. * * * It was his cook that he saw; or it was Mrs. Gill, * * * preparing a cold collation for the rectors. * * * I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother.” In a spirited speech to Uncle Sympson, who craved to get rid of the exasperating minx by disposing of her in respectable matrimony, she baits and badgers him until his feeble intellect is nearly shattered, ideas outraged, temper twisted beyond repair. No Victorian young niece should say to an elderly conventional guardian:[158] “Your god, sir, is the World. * * * Your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon. * * * See him busied at the work he likes best--making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living.” The novelist most admittedly generous to women is Meredith, and we have him to thank for Margaret Lovell, Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, Diana Warwick, and Clara Middleton, with Mrs. Berry as a sort of compromise between Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Tulliver. Yet they do not any more than live up to their boasted reputations, as dainty rogues in porcelain, famous epigrammatists, the quoted astonishment of drawing-rooms.[159] The real Victorian Shakespeare in the matter of women is Trollope. Not entirely unworthy of the sisterhood of Beatrice, Viola, and Portia, are Miss Dunstable, Lily Dale, Lucy Robarts, and Violet Effingham; Madeline Stanhope might be added as a village Cleopatra. Lily Dale is plaintively sympathetic on the subject of the sorrows of men through the vexations of their amusements:[160]