Irrespective of its value as a work of art, this novel possesses a deep
autobiographical interest also, as the character of Vania, the poor
student who loves Natasha through all her sin and shame, is
Dostoieffski's study of himself. Goethe once had to delay the completion
of one of his novels till experience had furnished him with new
situations, but almost before he had arrived at manhood Dostoieffski knew
life in its most real forms; poverty and suffering, pain and misery,
prison, exile, and love, were soon familiar to him, and by the lips of
Vania he has told his own story. This note of personal feeling, this
harsh reality of actual experience, undoubtedly gives the book something
of its strange fervour and terrible passion, yet it has not made it
egotistic; we see things from every point of view, and we feel, not that
fiction has been trammelled by fact, but that fact itself has become
ideal and imaginative. Pitiless, too, though Dostoieffski is in his
method as an artist, as a man he is full of human pity for all, for those
who do evil as well as for those who suffer it, for the selfish no less
than for those whose lives are wrecked for others and whose sacrifice is
in vain. Since Adam Bede and Le Pere Goriot no more powerful novel has
been written than Insult and Injury.

Mr. Hardinge's book Willow Garth deals, strangely enough, with something
like the same idea, though the treatment is, of course, entirely
different. A girl of high birth falls passionately in love with a young
farm-bailiff who is a sort of Arcadian Antinous and a very Ganymede in
gaiters. Social difficulties naturally intervene, so she drowns her
handsome rustic in a convenient pond. Mr. Hardinge has a most charming
style, and, as a writer, possesses both distinction and grace. The book
is a delightful combination of romance and satire, and the heroine's
crime is treated in the most picturesque manner possible.

Marcella Grace tells of modern life in Ireland, and is one of the best
books Miss Mulholland has ever published. In its artistic reserve, and
the perfect simplicity of its style, it is an excellent model for all
lady-novelists to follow, and the scene where the heroine finds the man,
who has been sent to shoot her, lying fever-stricken behind a hedge with
his gun by his side, is really remarkable. Nor could anything be better
than Miss Mulholland's treatment of external nature. She never shrieks
over scenery like a tourist, nor wearies us with sunsets like the Scotch
school; but all through her book there is a subtle atmosphere of purple
hills and silent moorland; she makes us live with nature and not merely
look at it.

The accomplished authoress of Soap was once compared to George Eliot by
the Court Journal, and to Carlyle by the Daily News, but we fear that we
cannot compete with our contemporaries in these daring comparisons. Her
present book is very clever, rather vulgar, and contains some fine
examples of bad French.