The first three-volume novel she published was called "Love's Conflict." It was written under sad circumstances. Her children were ill of scarlet fever; most of the servants, terror-stricken, had deserted her, and it was in the intervals of nursing these little ones that, to divert her sad thoughts, she took to her pen. From that time she wrote steadily and rapidly, and up to the present date she has actually turned out fifty-seven novels besides an enormous quantity of journalistic work, about one hundred short stories, and numerous essays, poems, and recitations. She says of herself, that from earliest youth she had always determined on being a novelist, and at the age of ten she wrote a story for the amusement of her playfellows, and illustrated it with her own pen-and-ink sketches (for be it known, the accomplished author has likewise inherited this talent from her father, and to this day she will decorate many a letter to her favourite friends with funny and clever little illustrations and caricatures). But she wisely formed the determination that she would never publish anything until her judgment was more matured, so as to ensure success, that she "would study people, nature, nature's ways, and character, and then she would let the world know what she thought"; and in this piece of self-denial she has shown extreme wisdom, and reaped her reward in the long record of successes that she has scored and the large fortune she has made, but which, alas! she no longer possesses. "Others have spent it for me," she says plaintively; but she adds generously, "and I do not grudge it to them." Part of it enabled her, at any rate, to give each and all of her children a thoroughly good education, and she is proud to think that they owe it all to her own hard work. Miss Marryat is always especially flattered to hear that her novels are favourites with women, and she had a gratifying proof of this when visiting Canada in 1885. She was waited on by a deputation of ladies, armed with bouquets and presents, to thank her for having written that charming story called "My Own Child."
"Gup," which had an extensive sale, is entirely an Anglo-Indian book, not so much of a novel as a collection of character sketches and tales, which her powers of observation enabled her to form out of the life in Indian stations. For the benefit of the uninitiated, the word "Gup" shall be translated from Hindustanee into English: "Gossip." "Woman Against Woman," "Veronique," "Petronel," "Nelly Brooke," "Fighting the Air," were amongst the earliest of the eighteen novels that she brought out in the first eleven years of her literary career. These, together with her "Girls of Feversham," have been republished in Germany and America, and translated into Russian, German, Swedish, and French. Miss Marryat says: "I never sit down deliberately to compose or think out a plot. The most ordinary remark or anecdote may supply the motive, and the rest comes by itself. Sometimes I have as many as a dozen plots, in different stages of completion, floating in my brain. They appear to me like a set of houses, the first of which is fully furnished; the second finished, but empty; the third in course of building; till the furthest in the distance is nothing but an outline. As soon as one is complete, I feel I _must_ write it down; but I never think of the one I am writing, always of the next one that is to be, and sometimes of three or four at a time, till I drive them forcibly away. I never feel at home with a plot till I have settled the names of the characters to my satisfaction. As soon as I have done that they become sentient beings in my eyes, and seem to dictate what I shall write. I lose myself so completely whilst writing, that I have no idea, till I take it up to correct, what I have written." Judging by the great heap of MSS. alluded to on her writing-table, there seems but little for the writer to correct. At your request, she hands you half a dozen pages, and you notice but three alterations amongst them; the facile pen, the medium of her thoughts, seems to have known exactly what it had to write. The novel is called "How like a Woman," and will shortly make its appearance.