MISS BRADDON'S LAST NOVEL.

Southland Times, Issue 1132, 29 March 1869, Page 3

MISS BRADDON'S LAST NOVEL.

The ' Saturday Review' has the following severe critique on Miss Braddon's last novel, "Run to Earth:" — This is Miss Braddon's idea of the events which touch the sympathy and experience of millions. A story filled from end to end with murder and attempts to murder, with suicides, abductions, consecration to revenge (and nothing coming of it), with bribery, disguises, and every kind of rascality — redeemed by the presence of a pure and noble minded adventuress, who keeps a gaming table were pigeons are plucked, yet who is a human lily nevertheless, and by a queenly street-singer who has had her sole experience of life among theives and sailors at Wapping, yet who is as perfectly well-bred as if she had been brought up at Court, and as pure as if she had never been outside the walls, of a nunnery — this is the kind of a thing which Miss Braddon puts forth as a picture of human life. " Run to Earth" is decidedly the worst book she has ever ! produced. She may be able to touch a i lower level still, for all things are possible ■', to genius ; and her genius for coarse sensationalism, her power for raking together moral garbage, and her capacity for dealing with the back slums of human nature, may have still undeveloped potentialities which shall one day startle the world with the spectacle of how low a clever writer can descend. Her style, too, has deteriorated, and the whole book bears the unmißLakeaole stamp of " copy waited for." It is wild, hurried, coarse, and yet wooden. There is no grace or play of fancy in it, no plastic power of passion ; it is like a collection of grim and ugly New Zealand idols cut hurriedly and coarsely, and after well-worn types, among which are set one or two staring painted dolls that do duty for beautiful idols, also modelled after well-known types. It is a book to give cause of rejoicing to the enemies .of sensationalism, for it is so undeniably poor and bad that even the partisans of the school cannot praise it, while will disgust many I waverei*s,i and confirm those who are only half hearted opponents.