A little more gift and a good deal more taste might have enabled Mrs.Trollope to do really great things in it: but she left them for her son to accomplish.

Attempts and "tries" at it had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached, especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable _Emilia Wyndham_ (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs.Marsh), which was wickedly described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real influence for no short time.
This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and relied chiefly on artistic presentment--on treatment rather than on subject.

It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or to make the mainsprings of her books.
The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for the most part without them.

But _Pendennis_ exhibited in itself, and taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest.

We have seen how, as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations had been partly seen and utilised.