May and December

Mrs. Hubback (Catherine Anne Austen) is well-known and highly esteemed as a writer; for her novels are in themselves good, and they have additional interest as coming from the niece of Miss Austen. It is true that Miss Austen's works are as generally neglected as they are universally eulogized, and that, instead of reading them in private and condemning them in public, most people do not peruse them in the closet or anywhere else, and yet make a point of praising them in the drawing-room. Still it is not less the fact that her name and genius, though not popular, are generally approved, and that the consequences of this singular regard have been most beneficial to Mrs. Hubback in literature. Mrs. Hubback has been and promises to be the most prolific creator of novels, for we believe that The Younger Sister, The Wife's Sister, The Rival Suitors, The Old Vicarage, May and December, Malvern, Life and its Lessons, and Agnes Milbourne, are not all the fictions which have proceeded from her pen since the commencement of 1850. (Novels and novelists: from Elizabeth to Victoria by John Cordy Jeaffreson, 1858)


Contemporary Review

May And December is a story of considerable interest, spun from the usual novel material, without any remarkable drawing of character or poetry of treatment. The plot hangs on the doings of a beautiful country girl, who is introduced by her cousin to his principal in business, a wealthy London widower, in order to bring about a marriage, which shall give the aspiring belle a fortune, in return for which she is to use the influence she may acquire, to gain him a partnership in the house. The plotting is successful as far as she is concerned. The gentleman becomes a devoted husband, and dies a year after their marriage, when the widow, to fulfil her obligations to her cousin, passes the whole business into his hands, and devotes her life and income to good thoughts and works. The cousin, after a proper time, offers himself as a candidate for the second husbandship, and is refused. There is the usual amount of the excellent invention, pleasant predicaments, and exciting positions, which form the stock-in-trade of the standard English novel,—and the book is, on tho whole, decidedly interesting to novel-readers.(The Crayon, New York, February 1855)