=The Liverpool Mercury.=--‘The book is a wonderful one--an evangel for the fair sex, and at once an inspiration and a comforting companion, to which thoughtful womanhood will recur again and again.’
=The Spectator.=--‘All these studies, male and female alike, are marked by humour, pathos, and fidelity to life.’
=The Speaker.=--‘In _Our Manifold Nature_ Sarah Grand is seen at her best. How good that is can only be known by those who read for themselves this admirable little volume.’
=The Guardian.=--‘_Our Manifold Nature_ is a clever book. Sarah Grand has the power of touching common things, which, if it fails to make them “rise to touch the spheres,” renders them exceedingly interesting.’
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
=The Pall Mall Gazette.=--‘It is long since we have read, and indeed re-read, any book of modern fiction with so absorbing an interest as _The Land of Cockayne_, the latest book by Matilde Serao (Heinemann), and surely as fine a piece of work as the genius of this writer has yet accomplished. It is splendid! The character-drawing is subtle and convincing; every touch tells. Such books as _The Land of Cockayne_ are epoch-making, voices that cry aloud in the wilderness of modern “literature,” and will be heard while others only cackle.’
=The Saturday Review.=--‘The work of Madame Serao, a novelist with rare gifts of observation and faculties of execution, only needs a little more concentration on a central motive to rank among the finest of its kind, the short novel of realism. She curiously resembles Prosper Mérimée in her cold, impersonal treatment of her subject, without digression or comment; the drawing of clear outlines of action; the complete exposure of motive and inner workings of impulse; the inevitable development of given temperaments under given circumstances. She works with insight, with judgment, and with sincerity.’
=The Pall Mall Gazette.=--‘Few living writers have given us anything equal to her splendid story _The Land of Cockayne_, and it is much to say that those who were stirred to enthusiasm by that book will experience no reaction upon reading the two stories here bound together. Genius is not too big a word for her.’