Lady Fanny. He writes about her, her books, her critics, her
successes, with a certain bitterness. Can it be possible that a
world which rather neglected Barry Lyndon was devoted to
Marchionesses and Milliners? Lady Fanny is represented as having
editors and reviewers at her feet; she sits among the flowers, like
the Sirens, and around her are the bones of critics corrupt in
death. She is puffed for the sake of her bouquets, her dinners, her
affabilities and condescensions. She gives a reviewer a great
garnet pin, adorned wherewith he paces the town. Her adorers
compare her to "him who sleeps by Avon." In one of Mr. Black's
novels there is a lady of this kind, who captivates the tribe of
"Log Rollers," as Mr. Black calls them. This lady appears to myself
to be a quite impossible She. One has never met her with her wiles,
nor come across her track, even, and seen the bodies and the bones
of those who perished in puffing her. Some persons of rank and
fashion have a taste for the society of some men of letters, but
nothing in the way of literary puffery seems to come of it. Of
course many critics like to give their friends and acquaintances an
applausive hand, and among their acquaintances may be ladies of
fashion who write novels; but we read nowhere such extraordinary
adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady Fanny. The
fashionable authoress is nearly extinct, though some persons write
well albeit they are fashionable. The fashionable novel is as dead
as a door nail: Lothair was nearly the last of the species. There
are novelists who write about "Society," to be sure, like Mr.
Norris; but their tone is quite different. They do not speak as if
Dukes and Earls were some strange superior kind of beings; their
manner is that of men accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing
for readers who do not care whether the hero is a lord or a
commoner. They are "at ease," though not terribly "in Zion."