Book Description

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[Pg 4] 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.” Our author is quite uncompromising in this matter; and her eulogy of “fig-leaves” should refute the most cynical: “I have seen a handsome young Indian, dying for love of a beautiful Indian maid; but all his courtship was, to fold his arms, pursue her with his eyes, and sighs were all his language: while she, as if no such lover were present, or rather as if she desired none such, carefully guarded her eyes from beholding him; and never approached him, but she looked down with all the blushing modesty I have seen in the most severe and cautious of our world.” The actual story of Oroonoko will hardly move us to-day; and the final scene, where that Prince and gentleman is seen smoking a pipe (!) as the horrid Christians “hack off” his limbs one by one, comes dangerously near the ludicrous. Still we may “hope,” with the modest authoress, that “the reputation of her pen is considerable enough to make his glorious name to survive all ages.” It should finally be remarked that Aphra forestalls one more innovation of the next century, by introducing slight descriptions of scenery; and that here, as always, she arrested her readers’ attention by plunging straight into the story. Two other professional women of that generation deserve mention: Mrs. Manley (1672-1724), author of the scurrilous New Atalantis, and Mrs. Heywood (or Haywood) (1693-1756), editor of the Female Spectator. Both were employed by their betters for the secret promotion of vile libels—the former political, the latter literary; and both wrote novels of some vigour, but deservedly forgotten: although the latest, and best, of Mrs. Manley’s were written after Pamela, and bear striking witness to the influence of Richardson. A few more years bring us to the true birth of the modern novel; when Sarah Fielding (1710-1768), whose David Simple, in an unfortunate attempt to combine sentiment with the picaresque, revealed some of her brother’s humour and the decided influence of Richardson. And though The Female Quixote of Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) has been pronounced “more absurd than any of the romances which it was designed[Pg 6] to ridicule,” Macaulay himself allows it “great merit, when considered as a wild satirical harlequinade”; and it remains an early, if not the first, example of conscious revolt against the artificial tyrannies of “Romance,” of which the evil influences on the art of fiction were soon to be triumphantly abolished for ever by a sister-authoress...