The Warrington Examiner. — 1874-11-14 (Warrington, Cheshire, England)

AND WORKING; OR FROM GIRLHOOD TO WOMANHOOD. By Mrs. G. S. Reaney. Henry King and Co., 65, Comhill, and 12, Paternoster Row, London. 1874. Price ss.  The dainty fashion in which publishers now-a-days issue their books to an expectant world almost makes one envious of the privileged persons who dwell in the charmed realm of modern authorship. The new volume of "Waking and Working," in its beautiful livery of green and gold—its curling ivy stems and golden lilies—shows how Art has begun to lend its grace to Literature, and make even the material part of it an enduring pleasure. Mrs. Iteaney is certainly fortunate in her publishers, to 'whom the handsome book before us is eminently creditable. We gather from the preface that " Waking and Working" is the expression of such personal experiences as often fall to the lot of those who are passing "from girlhood to womanhood, with all its life-awakenings, longings, and perplexities." Over these the authoress" yearna with great sympathy and love." In this volume she seeks to answer "the earnest questioning and solemn thought" of those who are just entering upon an age so critical and momentous. To these, her" younger sisters everywhere," this volume of "heart thoughts, and in part life's history," is dedicated. Although Waking and Working" is essentially and almost professedly what may be called a religious book, the lessons sought to be inculcated by the authoress assume the popular story form, and "the beauty of holiness " is developed through the series of character sketches and incidents which constitute the narrative. The work breathes a purity of intention, and a placid and restrained earnestness of purpose which—in the best sense of the term, is almost pathetic in its simplicity. The world in which the characters in "Waking and Working" live, and move, and have their entirely innocent being, is so free from human taint that it conveys to the mere worldling imagination, glimpses of an existence which certainly affords the stimulus of contrast. The atmosphere inhabited by "May Percival," and "Grace Sullivan," and" Henry St. George," and "Florence Winton," and others of the dramatis personce of the books (the authoress, it will be seen, has quite a genius for the invention of pbturesuque and musical names) is perhaps a little rarified and artificial, but, as the reader will perceive, (be it he or she; belonging as may be, to the fair order of girlhood or womanhood, or to the rougher and more incorrigible sex, who are regrettably callous to the appeal of delicacy and refinement), we say the reader will perceive that there is not a line or a sentiment, an incident or a moral, in the book, which may not carry:some service or lesson of its own to the mind prepared for its appreciation. We cannot say that it is any demerit of the authoress that the placid flow of her twenty chapters is never broken by any of those incursions of villains and villainy with which some of our living lady nuvelists seek to enter,. tam, and edify the fire-eaters of the circulating librarY• There is nobody murdered by a blue-eyed beauty, with a white and delicate throat, and the most immaculate manners. The dare-devil crime of forgery might be one of the lost arts for anything we hear of it in "Waking and Working." It contains no spiteful and diabolical ,little minx, who, like the elephant's trunk, can pick up a wicked little pin, or wield a very oak of the largest and matnrest iniquity. There is not in this book 'even an atrocious hypocrite, who, after stealthily administering poison to an affectionate wife, cants blasphemously by her dying bed, and duly expiates his diabolical crime on the gallows after shaking hands with the "prison philan'' thropist." We shall all be glad, doubtless, when Ws shall cease to sup full of the horrors purveyed for our delicate appetites by the novelist of the period, and We frankly and cheerfully avow our belief that the quiet and unruffiing pictures of harmless living and even feminine ways and fancies, reflected in "Waking and, Working "are vastly to be preferred as social and moral influences, to the shriek and dagger literature which seems specialy devised to make the Ten Command. ments unfashionable—to make " Marguerites "of oar women, and of our men the blase and hapless disciples of "Mephistopheles."