William Mulready, Young Girl with a Basket of Eggs
A farmer's daughter grows up admiring her brother and striving to be virtuous.
Elizabeth Missing Sewell (1815-1906) wrote some 13 novels, many, like this one, first-person narratives of a girl’s entry into adulthood. The reader must endure some pious tedium, but in exchange gets a set of living, original characters and a fine-grained representation of life on a tenant farm—a refreshing change from the usual aristocratic setting.
“To those who have leisure and patience, Ursula may be recommended as a careful and able depiction of country scenery, of a peculiar kind of country life, and a painstaking delineation of various characters, but time and patience are indispensable to its relish.” Spectator, April 17, 1858
“The characters are drawn with truth to nature, and they give a colour and turn to the circumstances and incidents of the story rather than the circumstances to them, which is as it should be, for in real life the same incidents played by different characters would lead to widely different results. Of course, the aim . . . is didactic; but . . . the book is genial and kindly, and the impression left on the mind is pleasant.” Athenaeum, April 24, 1858
Sewell’s purpose is “to delineate character—to analyze the mixed motives of human conduct—to trace the effects of moral errors in the unhappiness and disappointment which spring from them, and of self-denying virtue in its consequent happiness and contentment.” Literary Gazette, May 8, 1858
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