Love Me Little, Love Me Long [1859]
TO MY MALE READERS.
I SEE with some surprise that there still linger in the field of letters writers who think that, in fiction, when a personage speaks with an air of conviction, the sentiments must be the author’s own. (When two of his personages give each other the lie, which represents the author? both?)
I must ask you to shun this error; for instance, do not go and take Eve Dodd’s opinion of my heroine, or Mrs. Bazalgette’s, for mine.
Miss Dodd, in particular, however epigrammatic she may appear, is shallow: her criticism pche par la base. She talks too much as if young girls were in the habit of looking into their own minds, like little metaphysicians, and knowing all that goes on there; but, on the contrary, this is just what women in general don’t do, and young women can’t do.
No male will quite understand Lucy Fountain who does not take “instinct” and “self-deception” into the account. But with those two dews and your own intelligence, you cannot fail to unravel her, and will, I hope, thank me in your hearts for leaving you something to study, and not clogging my sluggish narrative with a mass of comment and explanation.
The End.
Love Me Little, Love Me Long by Charles Reade.
[x]#122 fan zaterdag 12 januari 2002 @ 01:24:24
