• "The slight but kindly recognition of weak cleverness that is all the criticism due from us to novels by the authoress of ‘East Lynne,' and the silence in which it would be kindness to pass over the crude, coarse, and prosaic tails of bigamy and murder by the authoress of ‘Lady Audley's Secret,' no longer fit the time when these writers have been forced chiefly or altogether, we fear, by the misapplied laudations of a critic in the Times into a popularity discreditable to the public taste." (99)
• "What is there to raise the novels of these ladies above mediocrity? Are they good in language, thought, or story?" (99); The answer, of course, is a long-winded NO.
• "We are very sure, also, that neither Mrs. Wood nor Miss Braddon, whose novels are coarser and worse than Mrs. Wood's, has achieved in any book one shrewd and original thought." (99)
• "If Mrs. Wood desires to run a race of popularity with Miss Braddon, there must be no baulking of the reader's appetite for bigamy and murder; there must be constant addition instead of diminution of the dose of cayenne in the literary curry." (100); This is followed by a long and hilarious diatribe about a woman who juggles not two husbands, but eight.
• "We forget how many slops of fiction a sensation writer of the new school usually drops at a time, say three, then how delicious would be the exercise of ingenuity in threading the maze among three dozen or more husbands of three fair polygamist heroines." (100)
• "In despair over her own grammar, Mrs. Wood. . ." (102)
• "An offensive seizing of the reader by the button for a jerk of personal address is part of the bad taste of the writer." (102)
• In general, this reviewer is speaking out against the low quality of writing in sensation fiction, with more than a small hint of class bias thrown in.

Pamela E. Bedore