The character of Linny Lockwood is a very beautiful one, and the story appeals to the reader's sensibilities more strongly than the recital of Susan Hopley's adventures or the girlish sorrows of Lilly Dawson.
Mrs. Crowe's writings certainly heralded the advent of a new kind of fiction: a kind which has been, perhaps more than any other, characteristic of the early years of the Victorian Age. It is the literature of domestic realism, of homely unromantic characters, which no accessories of exciting adventure can render interesting or remarkable in themselves--characters distinguished by every sort of virtue, yet not possessed of any ideal attractiveness. She is old-fashioned enough to insist upon a happy ending, to punish the wicked and to reward the good. But amid all the conventionality of her style, one is conscious of a note of hard common sense and a power of seeing things as they really are, which in these days would probably have forced her (perhaps against her will) into the realistic school. She seems, in fact, to hover between two ages of literature, and to be possessed at times of two different spirits--one the romantic and the supernatural, the other distinctly commonplace and workaday. Perhaps it is by the former that she will be chiefly remembered, but it is through the latter that she takes a place in English literature. She left a mark upon the age in which she lived, and she helped, in a quiet, undemonstrative fashion, to mould the women of England after higher ideals than had been possible in the early days of the century. Those who consider the development of women to be one of the distinguishing features of Queen Victoria's reign should not forget that they owe deep gratitude to writers like Mrs. Crowe, who upheld the standard of a woman's right to education and economic independence long before these subjects were discussed in newspapers and upon public platforms. For, as George Eliot has said, with her usual wisdom, it is owing to the labours of those who have lived in comparative obscurity and lie in forgotten graves, that things are well with us here and now.
Caroline Clive was the second daughter and co-heiress of Edmund Meysey-Wigley, of Shakenhurst, Worcestershire. She was born in 1801, at Brompton Green, London, and was married in 1840 to the Rev. Archer Clive, Rector of Solihull, Warwickshire. In the latest edition of her poems, her daughter states that "Mrs. Archer Clive, from a severe illness when she was three years old, was lame; and though her strong mind and high spirit carried her happily through childhood and early life, as she grew up she felt sharply the loss of all the active pleasures enjoyed by others."