This is especially the case with Mrs. Henry Wood. It is impossible to claim for her any lofty literary position; she is emphatically un-literary and middle-class. But she never has cause to say, "Story? God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir," for she always has a very distinct and convincing story, which she handles with a skill which can perhaps be valued only by the professional novelist, who knows the technical difficulty of handling the numerous _groups_ of characters which Mrs. Wood especially affects. There is no book of hers which deals--as so many novels deal--with merely one or two characters. She takes the whole town into her story, wherever it may be. We not only know the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff and the Squire, but we are intimate (particularly intimate) with the families of the local lawyer and doctor. We are almost equally well acquainted with their bootmaker and green-grocer, while their maids and their grooms are as much living entities to us as if they had served us in our own houses. To take a great group of _dramatis personæ_, widely differing in circumstances, in character, in individuality; to keep them all perfectly clear without confusion and without wavering; to evolve from them some central figures on which the attention of the subsidiary characters shall be unavoidably fixed, and to weave a plot of mystery, intrigue, treachery or passion which must be resolved to its ultimate elements before the last page of the book--to do all this is really an achievement of which many a writer, who values himself on his intellectual superiority to Mrs. Henry Wood, might well be proud. It is no more easy to marshal a multitude of characters in the pages of your book than to dispose bodies of soldiers in advantageous positions over an unknown country. The eye of a general is in some respects needed for both operations, and the true balance and proportion of a plot are not matters which come by accident or can be accomplished without skill. It may not be literary skill, but it is skill of a kind which deserves recognition, under what name soever it may be classed.
Mrs. Henry Wood was born in Worcestershire in 1814, and died in London in 1887. She suffered from delicate health and passed the greater part of her life as an invalid. She was the daughter of Mr. Thomas Price, one of the largest glove manufacturers in the city of Worcester. She married Mr. Henry Wood, the head of a large banking and shipping firm, who retired early from work and died comparatively young. It was not until middle life that Mrs. Wood began to write; and her first work,--perhaps, of all her works, the most popular--was "East Lynne," which first appeared in _Colburn's New Monthly Magazine_. Its success was prodigious and it is still one of the most popular novels upon the shelves of every circulating library. It has been translated into many languages and dramatised in different forms. It was published in 1861, and reached a fifth edition within the year.