The Columbian. [volume] (Bloomsburg, Pa.) 1866-1910, 1866-05-26
HOMICIDAL HEROINES.

THE authors and authoresses of the
day are going in for crimes of every de-
scription, from murder downward, in a
manner that is most startling, and Mr..
Mudie's lending library will soon be-
come Il sort of Newgate Calendar. What
with lovely mnurderesses, and accom-
plishcd bigamists, and spies, and forg-
'ers, and here and there an occasional at
torney who is on their trail, works of
romance seem in a fair way to be very
liMely reading before long. The effect
produced on sensible and uniimaginative
people ought to be to render them sus-
picious of their nearest acquaintances.
The young lady who is kind enough to
teach ones daughters French and music
looks and talks like an ordinary being ;
hut it is very likely, if we only knew
nll, that she has got murderess in man
uscript in her bedroom, at the elabora-
tion of whose career she is working all
her spaHe hOurs, and through the vivid
delineatiGnt tof whose amatory and hOm-
icidal performances she hopes herself to
attain to literary fame. 1t is difficult to
believe how anybody who is to all out
ward appearance so harmless, and who
takes her meals with such regularity, can
de engaged in the manufacture of all
rthe frightful sentiments and narrowing
plots to the production of which she re-
tires, for anything we can tell, when the
music lessons and the French are over
f,r I,a hn ,xth in, 4 N
habit of depicting criminals in tragedy
costume, with clOaks over their shoul-
ders and daggers peeping from under
meath, haunting some lonely wayside
inn or galloping across country on the
back of some spirited horse, one would
not be so much surprised. Such would
seem the natural accessories of horror
in which feminine fancy dresses great
culprits. But this is not at all the con-
ventiOnal thing. Romantic writers have
far too much soror rirre to make their
murderers or murderesses do anything
SO Outlandish or absurd. That was the
fault of taste committed by writers o.
an older date who did not know the
world, and were always thinking that
criminals went about with dagger or Il
bowl. Experience of life teaches the
fair novelist, as well as her masculine
rivals, that If one wishes to find crime,
one has not got to go to the wayside inns,
or to watch for shadows alongside gar
den walls, or to listen for a stealthy foot
step on the staircase when the clock is
striking midnight; nor can she expect
to catch her criminal hero or heroine in
modern times performing in this violent
and affected style. The murderess OF
romance nowadays wears balmoral
5oots, and goes religiously TO kettle
drums. Her beauty is the most dazzling
sof all the beauty in the ballroom; hel
step the lightest, and her smile the
sweetest, in the waltz. She loves and is
beloved, and the husband who in the
first volume leads to the altar the fair
innocent creature of nineteen, will dis.
cover years after, and in the third vol
ume, that before he married her she had
already had, and possibly put An end to-
II husband or SO In private, forged per
haps a casual will, and led the county
police dance for whole week. The
mixture Of crime and crin0iine give,
a reality to the story that is enough t.
take away the breath of any quiet, mid
dle-aged gentleman who takes up sucl
great works of fiction, lie knows, from
imaginative people like Shakespeare anl
Others, how poison is supposed to he I'd
ministered in high, fictitious life; tha
some prince catches another prince sleep
ing in bower, and pours it in his ear
or that some beautiful Lucretia, after