The women novelists

BY R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON AUTHOR OF “TALES PROM CHAUCER” “TOWARDS RELIGION” “TENNYSON AND HIS POETRY”
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright 1918
I have to thank the editor and publisher of The Athenæum for permission to reprint the chapter on “Parallel Passages”; the editor and publisher of The Gownsman for permission to use “A Study in Fine Art”; Professor Gollancz and Messrs. Chatto & Windus for permission to reprint the section on “Cranford” which was written for an Introduction to a reprint of that novel in “The King’s Classics.”
THE WOMEN NOVELISTS
Although women wrote novels before Defoe, the father of English fiction, or Richardson, the founder of the modern novel, we cannot detect any peculiarly feminine elements in their work, or profitably consider it apart from the general development of prose.
In the beginning they copied men, and saw through men’s eyes, because—here and elsewhere—they assumed that men’s dicta and practice in life and art were their only possible guides and examples. Women to-day take up every form of fiction attempted by men, because they assume that their powers are as great, their right to express themselves equally varied.
But there was a period, covering about a hundred years, during which women “found themselves” in fiction, and developed the art, along lines of their own, more or less independently. This century may conveniently be divided into three periods, which it is the object of the following pages to analyse:
From the publication of Evelina to the publication of Sense and Sensibility , 1778-1811.
From the publication of Sense and Sensibility to the publication of Jane Eyre , 1811-1847.
From the publication of Jane Eyre to the publication of Daniel Deronda , 1847-1876.
It may be noticed, however, in passing to the establishment of a feminine school by Fanny Burney, that individual women did pioneer work; among whom the earliest, and the most important, is “the ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn” (1640-1689). She is generally believed to have been the first woman “to earn a livelihood in a profession, which, hitherto, had been exclusively monopolized by men,”—“she was, moreover, the first to introduce milk punch into England”! For much of her work she adopted a masculine pseudonym and, with it, a reckless licence no doubt essential to success under the Restoration. Yet she wrote “the first prose story that can be compared with things that already existed in foreign literatures”; and, allowing for a few rather outspoken descriptive passages, there is nothing peculiarly objectionable in her Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal Slave . Making use of her own experience of the West Indies, acquired in childhood, she invented the “noble savage,” the “natural man,” long afterwards made fashionable by Rousseau; and boldly contrasted the ingenuous virtues, and honour, of this splendid heathen with Christian treachery and avarice. The “great and just character of Oroonoko,” indeed, would scarcely have satisfied “Revolutionary” ideals of the primitive; since he was inordinately proud of his birth and his beauty, and killed his wife from an “artificial” sense of honour. But there is a naïvely exaggerated simplicity in Mrs. Behn’s narrative; which does faithfully represent, as she herself expresses it, “an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin.” Whence she declares “it is most evident and plain, that simple nature is the most harmless, inoffensive, and virtuous mistress. It is she alone, if she were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions of man: religion would here but destroy that tranquility they possess by ignorance; and laws would but teach them to know offence, of which now they have no notion ... they have a native justice, which knows no fraud; and they understand no vice, or cunning, but when they are taught by the white men.”