Madame de Stael thought her _vulgaire_--meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but "commonplace"; Charlotte Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same.

Readers without some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of "analysis" may consider her superficial.

On the other hand, it is notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly different tempers, tastes, and opinions.

The extraordinary quietness of her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength.
She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it in her own later days.

She seems to have confined herself (with what seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes.