A review of The Woman Thou Gavest Me in The Dial, Vol. LV, No. 657, November 1, 1913, pp. 358-61.

In the excerpt below, Payne derides Caine's novels as “slimy emotionalism, spiced as it is with bits of description as salacious as he dares to make them.”

Mr. Hall Caine requires nearly six hundred pages in which to tell the story of Mary O’Neill, the heroine of The Woman Thou Gavest Me. One hundred would have sufficed for all the story he has to tell, but the greater number permits him to slobber over his theme in the unrestrained and nauseating fashion that somehow seems to secure him a large following of readers. He draws his support from that subterranean or submerged public that is an eternal mystery to the critical intelligence, the public that is swayed by crude emotionalism, and upon which it seems possible to inflict any form...