Woman's Work in English Fiction, from the Restoration to the Mid-Victorian Period

by Clara Helen Whitmore

The historical novels written in France during the reign of Louis XIV paid no heed to chronology, but men and women whom the author knew well were dressed in the garb of historical personages, and various periods of the past were brought into the space of the story. The Recess was not a masquerade, but the plot and characters slightly picture the reign of Elizabeth. This was one of the first novels in which there was an attempt to represent a past age with something like accuracy. As this was one of the first historical novels, using the term in the modern sense, it had perhaps a right to be one of the poorest; for it is impossible to conceive three volumes of print in which there are fewer sentences that leave any impress on the mind than this once popular novel.

Sophia Lee wrote other novels which are said to be worse than this; but in 1797 she and her sister Harriet, who had the greater imagination, published The Canterbury Tales. Some of those written by Harriet are excellent. According to the story a group of travellers have met at an inn in Canterbury, where they are delayed on account of a heavy fall of snow. To while away the weary hours of waiting, as they are gathered about the fire in true English fashion, they agree, as did the Canterbury pilgrims of long ago, that each one shall tell a story. But the pilgrims whom Chaucer accompanied to the shrine of Thomas à Becket are accurately described, and between the tales they discuss the stories and exchange lively banter in which the nature of each speaker is clearly revealed. In The Canterbury Tales there is little character-drawing. Any one of the stories might have been told by any one of the narrators, and before the conclusion the authors dropped this device.

In the stories that are told the characters are weak, but the plots are interesting and many of them original and clever. These Tales represent the beginning of the modern short story.

In a preface to a complete edition of the Tales published in 1832, Harriet Lee wrote:

"Before I finally dismiss the subject, I think I may be permitted to observe that, when these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of Tales, professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fiction of the day. Innumerable Tales of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style."

The Canterbury Tales were read and reread a long time after they were written. A critic in Blackwood's says of them:

"They exhibit more of that species of invention which, as we have already remarked, was never common in English literature than any of the works of the first-rate novelists we have named, with the single exception of Fielding."

The most famous story of the collection is Kruitzener, or the German's Tale. Part of the story is laid in Silesia during the Thirty Years' War. Frederick Kruitzener, a Bohemian, is the hero, if such a term may be used for so weak a man. In his youth he is thus described:

"The splendour, therefore, which the united efforts of education, fortune, rank, and the merits of his progenitors threw around him, was early mistaken for a personal gift—a sort of emanation proceeding from the lustre of his own endowments, and for which, as he believed, he was indebted to nature, he resolved not to be accountable to man.... He was distinguished!—he saw it—he felt it—he was persuaded he should ever be so; and while yet a youth in the house of his father—dependent on his paternal affection, and entitled to demand credit of the world merely for what he was to be—he secretly looked down on that world as made only for him."

The tale traces the troubles which Kruitzener brings upon himself, his misery and his death. It belongs to romantic literature; the mountain scenes, a palace with secret doors, a secret gallery, a false friend, a mysterious murder, all these remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, but the story does not possess her power or her poetic charm. Ernest Hartley Coleridge said of this tale: "But the motif—a son predestined to evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father's punishment for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality of his son, is the very key-note of tragedy."