Talk:The Literary Sense

Reviews

• The Literary Digest;, Oct 31 1903: Instead of coming upon something critical, as the title might suggest, the reader will find within these pages eighteen brief love stories, or rather sketchy episodes in the love life of various young persons of both sexes. The peculiar distinction of the little tales lies in the fact that they represent people not under the influence of a real passion but such as are temperamentally inclined to be in love with love, who strive to live up to the situation and to keep themselves in tally, not with what ordinary people in every-day life actually do, but with what heroes and heroines are expected to do in books. The tales are in the main pervaded with an air of whimsicality, and are in a way the more pleasing because of the underlying sense that nothing poignant is involved. But even the vein of light irony does not save some of them from a sense of unreality. Others, on the other hand, are real enough to recall quite vividly certain passages in the lives of people we may have known, and which may have kept us guessing as to how seriously the actors themselves were involved. The book is sufficiently well written to justify its name, and is more likely to appeal to people of literary tastes and a due amount of leisure than to the rank and file of readers.

• The Outlook, Oct 10 1903: These short stories are unusually clever, and they are bound together, since each presents some phase of "make believe," as the children say—that is, of a longing for the theatrical or the " literary" which throws into confusion the particular love affair described (nearly all the stories deal with lovers' quarrels, comic or tragic). Both comic and tragic, for instance, is that of the homely and unloved maid who deceives her former mistress with elaborate accounts of her imaginary courtship and marriage, and in due time presents a borrowed baby for admiration. Mrs. Bland is becoming better known yearly on this side of the ocean as an English writer of decided originality and with the rare gift of humor.