REAL WOMEN IN FICTION

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LX, Issue LX, 31 October 1910, Page 2

REAL WOMEN IN FICTION

A September magazine hud rather an agreeable inspiration in calling together the distinguished company of real women who have been char»f<l»rs in more or less distinguished novels. "Little Dorrit," whose death was latelyannounced, lived her long life in very happy appreciation of the honor that "Charles" — as she recalled the famous novelist had done her. It was in 1855, during a walk together by the Thames, that Dickens remarked, "I am just going to write another book, Dorritt, and I shall put you in it. In fact, I think I shall call it 'Little Dorritt.' " Her father, who was an intimate friend of Dickens, could hardly have been pleased, however, with the portraits of Little Dorritt's family! The heroine of "Alice in Wonderland," Miss Alice Church, has had time, since her inimitable namesake appeared, to grow up, to live a happy married life, and, unlike that less mortal namesake, at last to die. Within the last few years there has died also the Baroness BurdettCoutts, whose splendid philanthropy suggested the part of Angela Messenger in Walter Besant's "All Sorts and Conditions of Men." Without Lady Isabel Burton, that lady of intellectual and travelling fame, Morley Roberts would have missed a heroine for his fine story, "A Son of Empire"; and the Empress Eugenic, if she does not appear as chief heroine, at least takes some royal part in stories by Grant, Zola, and Henry Kingsley. With Disraeli, it was such a common fashion to include real persons in his novels, that no special interest attaches to any one on his long list, but Zenobia of "Endymion" survives in the Marchioness of Blandford; while a later Marchioness of Granby is Ideala of a novel by Sarah Grand. Mrs Asquith has had rather hard fate in literature, being distinguished first by Mr Benson as the brilliant but ill-behaved Dodo, and later By Mr William Watson as "The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue." Marie Bashkirtseff also suffered badly in fiction at the hands both of Mallock and Mrs Humphry Ward. And Mrs Woods, in writing "The Vagabond," really helped herself to more than a novelist justly might from the life of "Sister Dora."