The Heart of a Child: Being Passages from the Early Life of Sally Snape Lady Kidderminster

388 pp. "Mrs. Frankau has attempted to maintain the affirmative side of this thesis, and apparently she thinks that she has succeeded. It is true that she deliberately makes her specific case a peculiarly difficult one; that she takes her future Gaiety Girl, Sally Snape, from the most dilapidated and degraded rook's nest to be found in the London slums; that she shows her peculiarly friendless and unguarded, and innocently unaware of the dangers that beset her; that she brings her repeatedly in contact with the people likely to do her the most harm -- and yet, in spite of hardships and temptations, shows us so convincingly just how the girl escapes, and not merely escapes, but in every case unconsciously achieves an advantage from the very circumstances that wrought her danger, that we feel, almost to the end of the story, no sense of a straining of the facts, a distortion of probabilities. Not until her marriage with Lord Kidderminster do we question even slightly that the career of Sally Snape befell precisely as "Frank Danby" has so admirably chronicled it. But if we are to regard it as a solution of the thesis she has propounded, the answer must be epitomized somewhat after this fashion: the young woman who goes upon the stage, unless surrounded by special safeguards of money and influence, finds herself beset by such a host of insidious dangers, that she has small chance of maintaining her honour, unless protected first by the immaturity of her temperamental development, and secondly by a most persistent and unusual run of good luck. Mrs. Frankau is undoubtedly within her rights in showing how slight a cause, a mere toss of a coin, decides between the upward and the downward path. Many another novelist has made his heroine's downfall dependent on a whim of chance; it is equally logical to assume With "Frank Danby" that fate may intervene to save rather than to destroy. Yes, it is not only logical. but when done with the assured touch, the probing knowledge of human nature that is shown in The Heart of a Child, it is strongly dramatic... but that Mrs. Frankau has nevertheless seized and flung before us in her pages with such poignancy and power that we feel that we are being allowed to probe a woman's inmost soul, and are stirred to mingled laughter and tears at the truth and the pathos of her picture. The Heart of a Child is drawn upon a narrower canvas than Pigs in Clover, yet there is some character study in it which surpasses any of her previous work."