What shall I say about the literary shrew? Let no one be mistaken--we
have a good many of them, and we shall have more and more of them.
There are kind and charming lady-novelists in plenty, and we all owe
them fervent thanks for happy hours; there are deeply-cultured ladies
who make the joy of placid English homes; there are hundreds on
hundreds of honest literary workers who never set down an impure or
ungentle line. I am grateful in reason to all these; but there is
another sort of literary woman towards whom I pretend to feel no
gratitude whatever, and that is the downright literary shrew, who
usually writes, so to speak, in a scream, and whose sentences resemble
bursting packets of pins and needles. She is what the Americans would
call "death on man," and she likes to emphasize her invectives by
always printing "Men" with a capital "M." She is however rigidly
impartial in her distribution of abuse, and she finds out at frequent
intervals that English women and girls are going year by year from bad
to worse. That the earth does not hold a daintier, purer, more
exquisitely lovable being than the well-educated, well-bred English
girl, is an opinion held even by some very cynical males; but the
literary shrew rattles out her libels, and, in order to show how very
virtuous she is, she usually makes her articles unfit to be brought
within the doors of any respectable house.
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