“Another source of the popularity of her sketches is found in the spirit and vivacity of her descriptions—showing a clear and close eye for the observation of nature—and in the lifelike truthfulness of her character-drawing. Her personages are not mere pegs on which to hang a story—a train of external incidents: they are themselves the story. They are not mere labelled embodiments of the virtues and vices of the Decalogue, but actual men and women, brought by a few simple but effective touches livingly before the eye, and, even in her lightest sketches, sharply individualized. Thus the interest of her stories is emphatically a human interest. It is not what the actors _do_, but what they _are_, that rivets our attention, and chains us to her fascinating pages. As might be inferred from this, she possesses extraordinary dramatic power. The _dramatis personæ_ live and breathe and move through the story. The author transports herself into the scene; identifies herself with her characters; and instead of conducting her narration by cold, second-hand details, makes it gush warmly and livingly from the lips of the speakers. Not unfrequently nearly the whole story is unfolded by dialogue, natural, racy, and spirited, and that which in its mere outward details would be but a trivial incident, under this warm, dramatic handling, and imbedded in human passion, is impregnated with life and interest. Equally happy, too, is Emily in the conduct of her narrative—in the management of the plot—in so seizing upon the hinging-points, the _nodes_ and crises of the story, and so coloring, and grouping, and contrasting them, as to give them their utmost effect. With the instinctive eye of genius, she separates the incidental from the essential, and strikes to the inmost core of her subject.
“And finally—and here perhaps was pre-eminently the secret of Emily’s power—she was drawing from her own life, ‘coloring from her own heart.’ With every stroke of her pen she daguerreotyped herself upon the page before her. The trials of her youth—her own harsh experiences—quivered through her bright and glittering fancies, and compelled many a tear from hearts unknowing of the cause. She was unconsciously obeying the dictum of the great Master; she moved others because she had first been moved herself. The tear that trembled in their eye answered to that which had first glistened in her own. The emotion that swelled their bosoms was responsive to that which had throbbed in her own breast. True to herself, she was true to the universal elements of humanity.
“And yet she was far from being the mere recorder; she dealt not in the mere statistics of experience. Her power of fancy was equal to her power of feeling. The germ of her conception sprung from the actual, but it developed itself in the realm of the ideal. When fancy supplied the groundwork, her feelings insensibly blended themselves with it, giving it genuineness and vitality. When she started from experience, fancy instantly stood as its servitor, ready to invest the creation with her bright and glittering hues. Thus her heart and life-experiences were so transfigured and idealized that she did not obtrude herself indelicately or painfully before the public. ‘Grace Linden,’ ‘Lilias Fane,’ ‘Dora,’ ‘Nora Maylie,’ ‘Ida Ravelin,’ even, were all born in he depths of her own nature, all embodied a certain portion of her spiritual essence; yet all were so wrought and moulded, so blended with imaginative elements, that she for whom they really stood ‘passed in music out of sight.’ So amidst the deeper emotions of later life her power of imagination kept pace with her power of passionate emotion. ‘My Bird,’ ‘Watching,’ ‘My Angel Guide,’ are beautifully idealized, and it is only perhaps in ‘Sweet Mother’ that the bleeding, agonizing heart of the stricken wife and daughter comes nakedly before the public. And with all this, there breathes through all her pages a tenderness and delicacy of sentiment which impart to them a nameless charm.