There are several things that make this mode of art unique. One
of the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests of
woman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian women
have done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrue
proposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that many
women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never
heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively
founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to
Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following
a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane
exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single
modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of
undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles
things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,
as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no
writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without
seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists.
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