In the majority of women’s books you see that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent. The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman. On this ground, we believe that the average intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who write ill are very far below it. So that, after all, the severer critics are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in recommending women of mediocre faculties – as at least a negative service they can render their sex – to abstain from writing.

The standing apology for women who become writers without any special qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But society, like ‘matter’, and Her Majesty’s Government, and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three women who write from vanity; and, besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances. ‘In all labour there is profit’; but ladies’ silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labour than of busy idleness.

Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest; – novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements – genuine observation, humour, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine’s ass, who puts his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, ‘Moi, aussi, je joue de la flute’; – a fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number of ‘silly novels by lady novelists’.

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  1. BOCCACCIO · Mrs Rosie and the Priest
  2. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS · As kingfishers catch fire
  3. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
  4. THOMAS DE QUINCEY · On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
  5. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE · Aphorisms on Love and Hate
  6. JOHN RUSKIN · Traffic
  7. PU SONGLING · Wailing Ghosts
  8. JONATHAN SWIFT · A Modest Proposal
  9. Three Tang Dynasty Poets
  10. WALT WHITMAN · On the Beach at Night Alone
  11. KENKŌ · A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
  12. BALTASAR GRACIÁN · How to Use Your Enemies
  13. JOHN KEATS · The Eve of St Agnes
  14. THOMAS HARDY · Woman much missed
  15. GUY DE MAUPASSANT · Femme Fatale
  16. MARCO POLO · Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
  17. SUETONIUS · Caligula
  18. APOLLONIUS OF RHODES · Jason and Medea
  19. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON · Olalla
  20. KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS · The Communist Manifesto
  21. PETRONIUS · Trimalchio’s Feast
  22. JOHANN PETER HEBEL · How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
  23. HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN · The Tinder Box
  24. RUDYARD KIPLING · The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
  25. DANTE · Circles of Hell
  26. HENRY MAYHEW · Of Street Piemen
  27. HAFEZ · The nightingales are drunk
  28. GEOFFREY CHAUCER · The Wife of Bath
  29. MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE · How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
  30. THOMAS NASHE · The Terrors of the Night
  31. EDGAR ALLAN POE · The Tell-Tale Heart
  32. MARY KINGSLEY · A Hippo Banquet
  33. JANE AUSTEN · The Beautifull Cassandra
  34. ANTON CHEKHOV · Gooseberries
  35. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE · Well, they are gone, and here must I remain
  36. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE · Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
  37. CHARLES DICKENS · The Great Winglebury Duel
  38. HERMAN MELVILLE · The Maldive Shark
  39. ELIZABETH GASKELL · The Old Nurse’s Story
  40. NIKOLAY LESKOV · The Steel Flea
  41. HONORÉ DE BALZAC · The Atheist’s Mass
  42. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN · The Yellow Wall-Paper
  43. C. P. CAVAFY · Remember, Body …
  44. FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY · The Meek One
  45. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT · A Simple Heart
  46. NIKOLAI GOGOL · The Nose
  47. SAMUEL PEPYS · The Great Fire of London
  48. EDITH WHARTON · The Reckoning
  49. HENRY JAMES · The Figure in the Carpet
  50. WILFRED OWEN · Anthem For Doomed Youth
  51. WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART · My Dearest Father
  52. PLATO · Socrates’ Defence
  53. CHRISTINA ROSSETTI · Goblin Market
  54. Sindbad the Sailor
  55. SOPHOCLES · Antigone
  56. RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA · The Life of a Stupid Man
  57. LEO TOLSTOY · How Much Land Does A Man Need?
  58. GIORGIO VASARI · Leonardo da Vinci
  59. OSCAR WILDE · Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
  60. SHEN FU · The Old Man of the Moon
  61. AESOP · The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon
  62. MATSUO BASHŌ · Lips too Chilled
  63. EMILY BRONTË · The Night is Darkening Round Me
  64. JOSEPH CONRAD · To-morrow
  65. RICHARD HAKLUYT · The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe
  66. KATE CHOPIN · A Pair of Silk Stockings
  67. CHARLES DARWIN · It was snowing butterflies
  68. BROTHERS GRIMM · The Robber Bridegroom
  69. CATULLUS · I Hate and I Love
  70. HOMER · Circe and the Cyclops
  71. D. H. LAWRENCE · Il Duro
  72. KATHERINE MANSFIELD · Miss Brill
  73. OVID · The Fall of Icarus
  74. SAPPHO · Come Close
  75. IVAN TURGENEV · Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands
  76. VIRGIL · O Cruel Alexis
  77. H. G. WELLS · A Slip under the Microscope
  78. HERODOTUS · The Madness of Cambyses
  79. Speaking of Siva
  80. The Dhammapada
  81. JANE AUSTEN · Lady Susan
  82. JEAN-JACQUES ROSSEAU · The Body Politic
  83. JEAN DE LA FONTAINE · The World is Full of Foolish Men
  84. H. G. WELLS · The Sea Raiders
  85. LIVY · Hannibal
  86. CHARLES DICKENS · To Be Read at Dusk
  87. LEO TOLSTOY · The Death of Ivan Ilyich
  88. MARK TWAIN · The Stolen White Elephant
  89. WILLIAM BLAKE · Tyger, Tyger
  90. SHERIDAN LE FANU · Green Tea
  91. The Yellow Book
  92. OLAUDAH EQUIANO · Kidnapped
  93. EDGAR ALLAN POE · A Modern Detective
  94. The Suffragettes
  95. MARGERY KEMPE · How To Be a Medieval Woman
  96. JOSEPH CONRAD · Typhoon
  97. GIACOMO CASANOVA · The Nun of Murano
  98. W. B. YEATS · A terrible beauty is born
  99. THOMAS HARDY · The Withered Arm
  100. EDWARD LEAR · Nonsense
  101. ARISTOPHANES · The Frogs
  102. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE · Why I Am so Clever
  103. RAINER MARIA RILKE · Letters to a Young Poet
  104. LEONID ANDREYEV · Seven Hanged
  105. APHRA BEHN · Oroonoko
  106. LEWIS CARROLL · O frabjous day!
  107. JOHN GAY · Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London
  108. E. T. A. HOFFMANN · The Sandman
  109. DANTE · Love that moves the sun and other stars
  110. ALEXANDER PUSHKIN · The Queen of Spades
  111. ANTON CHEKHOV · A Nervous Breakdown
  112. KAKUZO OKAKURA · The Book of Tea
  113. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE · Is this a dagger which I see before me?
  114. EMILY DICKINSON · My life had stood a loaded gun
  115. LONGUS · Daphnis and Chloe
  116. MARY SHELLEY · Matilda
  117. GEORGE ELIOT · The Lifted Veil
  118. FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY · White Nights
  119. OSCAR WILDE · Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
  120. VIRGINIA WOOLF · Flush
  121. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE · Lot No. 249
  122. The Rule of Benedict
  123. WASHINGTON IRVING · Rip Van Winkle
  124. Anecdotes of the Cynics
  125. VICTOR HUGO · Waterloo
  126. CHARLOTTE BRONTË · Stancliffe’s Hotel

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This edition published in Penguin Classics 2016

ISBN: 978-0-241-25124-9

* Inscription on Swift’s tombstone.

*  ‘What you call the spirit of the age
    Is but the critic’s spirit, in whose page
    The age itself is darkly glassed.’

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