FOOTNOTES:
[16] Her stepmother.
CONCLUSION
We find, in the main, that women developed—and perfected—the domestic novel. They made circulating libraries respectable, establishing the right, and the power, of women to write fiction.
They carried on the traditions of Richardson and Fielding by choosing the middle-class for subject, at first confining themselves to Society and the County, but extending—with George Eliot—to all “Professions,” and to a study of the poor. They made novels a reflection, and a criticism, of life.
It seems curious that, with the possible exception of Charlotte Brontë, women were all stern realists: while even her imaginativeness can scarcely be called romantic. The fact is, probably, that the heroes and heroines of romance were mainly conceived for young ladies, and popularly supposed to represent their ideal. Wherefore, when women began to express themselves, they—more or less consciously—set out to expose this fallacy: to prove that they could enjoy and face real life. No school of writers, indeed, has more fearlessly or more persistently created their characters from flesh and blood than the school represented by Jane Austen and George Eliot. None has dwelt more persistently on the trivial details of everyday life, the conquests of observation. Whether concerned, like Miss Burney, with the Comedy of Manners; or, like George Eliot, with the Analysis of Soul; they have one and all found their inspiration in human nature. And, in reality, this was the main progress achieved in fiction between Richardson and the nineteenth century—the growth on which the true modern novel was built up. Critics, indeed, have treated the “romance” and the “novel” as independent entities; and if we limit the term romance to work preceding Pamela, we may accept their dictum. There is an essential difference between “making up” characters from a pseudo-ideal of the possibilities in human nature, and reflecting life. The old system, no doubt, was unhealthy in two ways: The ideals not well-chosen, being composed by high-flown exaggeration; and they were so mingled with actuality as to deceive the young person. For that matter the complaint is still living that girls and boys continually fancy real life will prove “just like a novel.” It does not, of course, differ greatly from those of Jane Austen or George Eliot. The former, in fact, was accused—in her own day—of setting too high a price on “prudence” in matrimony; and the latter of encouraging a gloomy outlook.
Obviously realism, as here applied, has no connection with that Continental variety of the art which has more recently usurped the name. Women-writers, of this era, had not developed the cult of Ugliness, they did not confound painting with photography, they did not busy themselves with the morbid or the abnormal. Their works are not documents, but revelations. They dwell on manners, without ignoring their spiritual significance. To-day we have some use for the new realism, while dreading its predominance. They had none.
In enumerating the classes, or types, of humanity with whom the women-writers were mainly concerned, we were witnessing, of course, the allied progress of history. It was during the second half of the eighteenth, and the first of the nineteenth, centuries that the great English middle-class steadily grew in power and importance, boldly educating itself for influence,—before labour was heard in the land.
Fanny Burney has given us the “classes” at play; we fancy that Jane Austen, betraying their empty-mindedness, must have longed for, if she did not actually anticipate, better things; Charlotte Brontë utters the first protest, indicating a struggle for existence; George Eliot finds them busy about the meaning of life and its possibilities. Thus, finally, we read of real workers—men and women with the world at their feet, building an Empire, facing problems, questioning the gods.
And, in their own particular sphere,—the revelation of Woman,—we have seen already the same advance. Each of them gives us, for her own generation, a “new woman”; creating, by the revelation of possibilities, an actual type. By teaching us what was “going on” in women, they taught women to be themselves. They opened the doors of Liberty towards Progress.