Among the great realists, or novelists of character and domestic life, we must include the women who have written fiction. Of these the greatest is George Eliot, whose novels rank below those of Dickens and Thackeray only because they are lacking in humour and fun. They are very serious, but they give us women as they really are in heart and soul and emotion. The best of George Eliot’s novels is Middlemarch, the story of an English country village and especially of an interesting educated young woman, Dorothea Casaubon. But there are other and almost equally interesting quiet English characterizations. More dramatic in its plot is Adam Bede, which tells the story of a girl who had an illegitimate child which she destroyed. The Mill on the Floss begins by realistically describing the everyday life of two children, a boy and a girl, and many will find the first half of the book very dull and commonplace. The last half is dramatic enough, however, to make up for the dullness of the first part. Daniel Deronda is considered less successful, though Silas Marner is a classic. It is a shorter story, of a certain phase of English country life. These are practically all of George Eliot’s works, the two or three other books being hardly fascinating enough to hold the modern reader. To many Jane Austen is greater even than George Eliot. She wrote in the early part of the century, even before the appearance of the Waverley novels; but her stories are read as much to-day as they ever were. They are fine and exceedingly true portrayals of the uneventful but interesting heart life of a number of different young women in English country villages. Some consider Emma her greatest story; but it is less interesting than Sense and Sensibility (a study of two girls, one representing sense and the other sensibility) and Pride and Prejudice (the story of the marrying off of five daughters, one of whom is especially interesting and is the heroine). Jane Austen is notable in that she has a lively though quiet sense of humour that runs through all her work. Another charming, simple, and rather amusing study of English village life is Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, a book well worth reading if one is interested in the unheroic struggles and devotions of women. Of modern writers in this style, Mary Wilkins is probably the best, her short stories being superior to her novels. There are two women’s novels entirely different from any that had gone before or that have come after. They are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.