“I admire Miss Mitford just excessively. I dinna wunner at her being able to write sae weel as she does about drawing-rooms wi’ sofas and settees, and about the fine folk in them seeing themsels in lookin-glasses frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o’ me, is her pictures o’ poachers, and tinklers, and pottery-trampers, and ither neerdoweels, and o’ huts and hovels without riggin’ by the wayside, and the cottages o’ honest puir men, and byres, and barns, and stackyards, and merry-makins at winter ingles, and courtship aneath trees, and at the gable-end of farm houses, ’tween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her father’s ha’. That’s the puzzle, and that’s the praise. But ae word explains a’—Genius—Genius, wull a’ the metafhizzians in the warld ever expound that mysterious monosyllable.—Nov. 1826.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) has no place in the development of women’s work in fiction, since her one novel, Frankenstein, belongs to no type that has been attempted before or since, though it is often roughly described as a throw-back to the School of Terror. The conception of a man-made Monster, with human feelings—of pathetic loneliness and brutal cruelty—was eminently characteristic of an age which hankered after the byways of Science, imagined unlimited possibilities from the extension of knowledge, and was never tired of speculation. Inevitably the daughter of William Godwin had some didactic intentions; and her “Preface” declares her “by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence of universal virtue.” Among other things, Mrs. Shelley betrays her sympathy with Rousseau’s ideal of the “Man Natural,” and with vegetarianism. In a mood of comparative reasonableness and humanity the Monster promises, under certain conditions, to abandon his revenge and bury himself in the “Wilds of South America.”
“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries will afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food.”
The ethical struggle, with which Mrs. Shelley has here concerned herself, arises from circumstances beyond the pale of experience; but her solution is characteristic, and echoes the spirit of Shelley himself. Frankenstein, “in a fit of enthusiastic madness, has created a rational creature,” who, finding himself hated by mankind, resolves to punish his creator. He promises, however, to abstain from murdering Frankenstein’s family, if that man of science will make for him a female companion with whom he may peacefully retire to the wilderness. Obviously the temptation is great. Frankenstein’s brother has been already destroyed: it would seem his duty to protect his father and his wife. But, on the other hand,
“My duties towards my fellow-creatures had greater claims to my attention, because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature.”
There is no professional art in the story of Frankenstein, though it has a certain gloomy and perverse power. It is told in letters from an arctic explorer “To Mrs. Saville, England”; and the monster’s own life-story, with the only revelation of his emotions, is narrated within this narrative, in a monologue to Frankenstein.
It is uncertain whether the work would ever have been remembered, or revived, apart from our natural interest in the author; although, so far as it has any similarity with other work, it belongs to a class of novels which English writers have seldom attempted, and never accomplished with any distinction.
Frances Trollope (1780-1863) has been so completely overshadowed by her son Anthony—himself a distinguished practitioner in the domestic novel—that few readers to-day are aware that her fertile pen produced a “whole army of novels and books of travel, sometimes pouring into the libraries at the rate of nine volumes a year.” She began her career—curiously enough, when she was past fifty—by a severely satirical attack on the United States, entitled Domestic Manners of the Americans; and her first novel, The Abbess, did not appear till 1833. She was essentially feminine in the enthusiasm of her tirades against various practices in her generation, and has been freely criticised for want of taste. The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837), indeed, is coloured by a violent prejudice which goes far to justify this objection, and may even excuse the disparaging deduction on women’s intellect drawn by a contemporary reviewer, who thus characterises her spirited defence of “oppressed Orthodoxy”: