It is quite certain that on the whole Sinfi is the reader’s heroine. When Madox Brown read the story in manuscript, he became greatly enamoured of Sinfi, and talked about her constantly. It was the same with Mr. Swinburne, who says that ‘Aylwin’ is the only novel he ever read in manuscript, and found it as absorbing as if he were reading it in type. Mr. George Meredith in a letter said:—“I am in love with Sinfi. Nowhere can fiction give us one to match her, not even the ‘Kriegspiel’ heroine, who touched me to the deeps. Winifred’s infancy has infancy’s charm. The young woman is taking. But all my heart has gone to Sinfi. Of course it is part of her character that her destiny should point to the glooms. The sun comes to me again in her conquering presence. I could talk of her for hours. The book has this defect,—it leaves in the mind a cry for a successor.” And the author of ‘Kriegspiel’ himself, F. H. Groome, accepts Sinfi as the true heroine of the story. “In Sinfi Lovell,” says he, “Mr. Watts-Dunton. would have scored a magnificent success had he achieved nothing more than this most splendid figure—supremely clever but utterly illiterate, eloquent but ungrammatical, heroic but altogether womanly. Winifred is good, and so too is Henry Aylwin himself, and so are many of the minor characters (the mother, for instance, the aunt, and Mrs. Gudgeon), but it is as the tragedy of Sinfi’s sacrifice that ‘Aylwin’ should take its place in literature.” Yes, it seems cruel to tell the author this, but Sinfi, and not Winifred, with all her charm, is evidently the favourite of his English public. That admirable novelist, Mr. Richard Whiteing, said in the ‘Daily News’ that ‘Sinfi Lovell is one of the most finished studies of its type and kind in all romantic literature.’
[Picture: Sinfi Lovell and Pharaoh. (From a Painting at ‘The Pines.’)]
I have somewhere seen Sinfi compared with Isopel Berners. In the first place, while Sinfi is the crowning type of the Romany chi, Isopel is, as the author has pointed out, the type of the ‘Anglo-Saxon road girl’ with a special antagonism to Romany girls. Grand as is the character of Borrow’s Isopel Berners, she is not in the least like Sinfi Lovell. And I may add that she is not really like any other of the heroic women who figure in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s gallery of noble women. It is, however, interesting here to note that Mr. Watts-Dunton has a special sympathy with women of this heroic type and a special strength of hand in delineating them. There is nothing in them of Isopel’s hysterical tears. Once only does Sinfi, in the nobility of her affection for Aylwin, yield to weakness. Mr. Watts-Dunton’s sympathy with this kind of woman is apparent in his eulogy of ‘Shirley’:—