The scene
in which she shows her sketch for the first time to the art master and
the Mother Superior is very cleverly rendered indeed, and shows
considerable dramatic power.

Of course, a good deal of opposition takes place, but ultimately Margery
has her own way and, in spite of a wicked plot set on foot by a jealous
competitor, who persuades the Mother Superior that the picture is not
Margery's own work, she succeeds in winning the prize. The whole account
of the gradual development of the conception in the girl's mind, and the
various attempts she makes to give her dream its perfect form, is
extremely interesting and, indeed, the book deserves a place among what
Sir George Trevelyan has happily termed 'the art-literature' of our day.
Mr. Ruskin in prose, and Mr. Browning in poetry, were the first who drew
for us the workings of the artist soul, the first who led us from the
painting or statue to the hand that fashioned it, and the brain that gave
it life. They seem to have made art more expressive for us, to have
shown us a passionate humanity lying behind line and colour. Theirs was
the seed of this new literature, and theirs, too, is its flower; but it
is pleasant to note their influence on Miss Corkran's little story, in
which the creation of a picture forms the dominant motif.

* * * * *

Mrs. Pfeiffer's Women and Work is a collection of most interesting essays
on the relation to health and physical development of the higher
education of girls, and the intellectual or more systematised effort of
woman. Mrs. Pfeiffer, who writes a most admirable prose style, deals in
succession with the sentimental difficulty, with the economic problem,
and with the arguments of physiologists. She boldly grapples with
Professor Romanes, whose recent article in the Nineteenth Century, on the
leading characters which mentally differentiate men and women, attracted
so much attention, and produces some very valuable statistics from
America, where the influence of education on health has been most
carefully studied. Her book is a most important contribution to the
discussion of one of the great social problems of our day. The extended
activity of women is now an accomplished fact; its results are on their
trial; and Mrs. Pfeiffer's excellent essays sum up the situation very
completely, and show the rational and scientific basis of the movement
more clearly and more logically than any other treatise I have as yet
seen.

* * * * *

It is interesting to note that many of the most advanced modern ideas on
the subject of the education of women are anticipated by Defoe in his
wonderful Essay upon Projects, where he proposes that a college for women
should be erected in every county in England, and ten colleges of the
kind in London. 'I have often thought of it, 'he says,' as one of the
most barbarous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of
learning to women. Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew,
or make baubles. They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write
their names or so, and that is the height of a woman's education.