A critical perspective from 1883

It is the women of a novel which determine its truthfulness. The very subtlety of the sex makes any delineation a test of the writer’s truthfulness in art; for while a writer who is a law to himself will make this subtlety an excuse for drawing characters which transgress all known laws, an artist will employ the same subtlety to bring into distincter light the obedience to law which underlies subtlety. “The East and the West in Recent Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1883, pp. 704-705.