Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Lady Reading by A Window
An ordinary middle-class girl lives with her neglectful father in a small, gossip-prone city.
About Jane Ashton nothing appears to be known. This is her only novel. It is odd in its abrupt ending and its jaded view of human nature, which however it convincingly represents.
“The author has copied nature with fidelity. Her descriptions are minute and painstaking; and her manner, formed after Jane Austen, is not ill-adapted to convey a clear and distinct impression.” Athenaeum, May 11, 1878
“Sophia is a very brief tale of a very dull life in a small cathedral city. It . . . merits commendation for the attentive study which the writer has given to certain social types discoverable in most country towns, but so handled in this story that they are persons and not lay figures. The skill of the work lies in the fact that, although the heroine is . . . thoroughly commonplace . . . yet a certain compassionate interest in her fortunes is aroused . . . by means of . . . uncompromising realism of treatment.” Academy, July 13, 1878
A supplementary remark:
The Athenaeum review continues: “Miss Ashton will never please a large circle of readers if she devotes so much more care to the detection of the weaknesses of characters than to the illustration of their virtues. It is an unprofitable kind of cynicism which gives us only two endurable characters out of two dozen, and which exhibits those two as impersonations of the commonplace.”
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