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_Miss Gilbert's Career_. An American Story. By J.G. HOLLAND. New York:
Charles Scribner.

There is scarcely a more hazardous experiment for any novelist than "a
novel with a purpose." If the moral does not run away with the story, it
is in most cases only because the author's lucky star has made the moral
too feeble, in spite of his efforts, to do that or anything else,--in
other words, because his book has fortunately defeated its own object.
That any clever girl will be kept from the perilous paths of authorship
by the warnings, however strongly inculcated, of any novel whatever, we
are not prepared to assert: we venture to say no one will be deterred by
the history of Miss Fanny Gilbert. If a woman's happiness is to be found
in love, and not in fame, the question nevertheless recurs,--What is she
to do before the love comes? Our author only shows that his heroine's
restless unhappiness was owing to her having to wait for her heart to be
awakened: to prove what he desires to prove, he should demonstrate that
it was owing to her having adopted authorship during the time of her
waiting. During that time, Miss Fanny Gilbert wrote novels, and was
unhappy: would she have been happy, if, in the interval, she had
chronicled small beer? And even admitting that her authorship caused her
unhappiness, we can scarcely believe Dr. Holland prepared to say, after
having allowed his heroine a real talent, as one condition of the
problem, that she ought to have concealed that talent in the decorous
napkin of silence.

What the moral loses the story gains. Our author has lost nothing of
that genuine love of Nature, of that quick perception of the comic