narrow-minded father, and enabled to attain the full stature of their
genius only by that brief sojourn in Brussels, are representative.
Elizabeth Barrett, chained to a couch of invalidism under the eyes of an
imperiously affectionate father until with Robert Browning's aid she
secretly eloped into the open air of freedom and health, and so attained
complete literary expression, is a typical figure. It is only because we
recognise that she is a typical figure among the women who attained
distinction that we are able to guess at the vast number of mute
inglorious Elizabeth Barretts who were never able to escape by their own
efforts and never found a Browning to aid them to escape.

It is sometimes said that those days are long past and that young women,
in all the countries which we are pleased to called civilised, are now
emancipated, indeed, rather too much emancipated. Critics come forward to
complain of their undue freedom, of their irreverent familiarity to their
parents, of their language, of their habits. But there were critics who
said the very same things, in almost the same words, of the grandmothers
of these girls! These incompetent critics are as ignorant of the social
history of the past as they are of the social significance of the history
of the present. We read in _Once a Week_ of sixty years ago (10th August,
1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most
oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were
about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at "the young ladies
who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon
free discourse, and try to be like men." The writer of this anonymous
article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished
and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics,
pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and
Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast
young ladies" in every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to