But the
sincerity, the reality of all he can obtain from this writer will be
highly valued by the earnest man.
In one respect the book is entirely successful--in showing how inward
purity and honor may preserve a woman from bewilderment and danger,
and secure her a genuine independence. Whoever aims at this is still
considered, by unthinking or prejudiced minds, as wishing to despoil
the female character of its natural and peculiar loveliness. It is
supposed that delicacy must imply weakness, and that only an Amazon
can stand upright, and have sufficient command of her faculties to
confront the shock of adversity, or resist the allurements of
tenderness. Miss Bremer, Dumas, and the northern novelist, Andersen,
make women who have a tendency to the intellectual life of an artist
fail, and suffer the penalties of arrogant presumption, in the very
first steps of a career to which an inward vocation called them in
preference to the usual home duties. Yet nothing is more obvious than
that the circumstances of the time do, more and more frequently, call
women to such lives, and that, if guardianship is absolutely necessary
to women, many must perish for want of it.
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