The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

her wit are both dazzfing; her nose and her morals are alike free from any

tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she

is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and

reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not

an heiress�that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient;

but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many

matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as

a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips

in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her

reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric;

indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhap

sodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded con

versations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations,

amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks

through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior

instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and

watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side.

4. Repressed, kept down. Eliot's ideas about fiction at the time she was 1. Published anonymously in the Westminster beginning her first story, "The Sad Fortunes of the Rei'ieiv, this review essay, satirizing a number of Rev. Amos Barton." contemporary novels, provides a good indication of

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SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 3

You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps

you in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow being

carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may

accompany the heroine on her "starring" expedition through life. They see her

at a ball, and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding

excursion, and they are witched2 by her noble horsemanship; at church, and

they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanour. She is the ideal

woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this, she as often as not

marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots

and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his

heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right

moment. The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious

husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favour to him, to

marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the

lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at

this desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted

heroine pass through many mauvais3 moments, but we have the satisfaction

of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs,

that her fainting form reclines on the very best upholstery, and that whatever

vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having

her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more

blooming and locks more redundant4 than ever. We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious

scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely introduce us

into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We had imagined that

destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they

had no other "lady-like" means of getting their bread. On this supposition,

vacillating syntax and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the

extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are

offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but

we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we

pictured to ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and

daughters devoting themselves to the production of "copy" out of pure hero

ism,�perhaps to pay their husband's debts, or to purchase luxuries for a sick

father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady's novel: her

English might be faulty, but, we said to ourselves, her motives are irreproach

able; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty

writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by

tears. But no! This theory of ours, like many other pretty theories, has had to

give way before observation. Women's silly novels, we are now convinced, are

written under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently

never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no

notion of the working-classes except as "dependents;" they think five hundred

a-year a miserable pittance; Belgravia5 and "baronial halls" are their primary