The women novelists

In considering the women writers immediately following Miss Burney, we are confronted at the outset with a deliberate return to the methods of composition in vogue before Richardson. If Mrs. Radcliffe (1764-1823) employs, as she does, Defoe-like minuteness of detail in description, she entitles all her works “Romances,” and is fully justified in that nomenclature. “It was the cry at the period,” says her biographer, “and has sometimes been repeated since, that the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the applause with which they were received, were evil signs of the times, and argued a great and increasing degradation of the public taste, which, instead of banqueting as heretofore upon scenes of passion, like those of Richardson, or of life and manners, as in the pages of Smollett and Fielding, was now coming back to the fare of the nursery, and gorged upon the wild and improbable fictions of an over-heated imagination.”

Yet the anonymous author of the Pursuits of Literature writes of some sister-novelists: “Though all of them are ingenious ladies, yet they are too frequently whining and frisking in novels, till our girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures. Not so the mighty magician of The Mysteries of Udolpho, bred and nourished by the Florentine muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of enchantment: a poetess whom Ariosto would with rapture have acknowledged, as

‘... La nudrita
Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco.’”—O.F. c. xlvi.

We fear to-day it would be difficult to find men “too mercurial to be delighted” by Richardson, “too dull to comprehend” Le Sage, “too saturnine to relish” Fielding, who would yet “with difficulty be divorced from The Romance of the Forest”: since every one of us now

“boasts an English heart,
Unused at ghosts or rattling bones to start.”

Jane Austen, of course, could never have written Northanger Abbey had she not enjoyed Mrs. Radcliffe; and we say at once that those delightfully absurd chapters in which Catherine is allowed to indulge in the most unfounded suspicions of General Tilney, are not substantially unfair to the famous wife of William Radcliffe, Esq.; as the artless conversations between Miss Morland and Miss Thorpe no doubt justly reflect the deep interest excited by her stories in the young and inexperienced. We do not readily, to-day, admire so much “exuberance and fertility of imagination”: we have little, or no, patience with “adventures heaped on adventures in quick and brilliant succession, with all the hairbreadth charms of escape or capture,” resembling some “splendid Oriental tale.”

But there can be no question that Mrs. Radcliffe achieved, in three admirable examples, a perfectly legitimate attempt—the establishment of that School of Terror inaugurated by no less brilliant a writer than Horace Walpole (in his Castle of Otranto, 1764), and seldom revived in England with any success.

It is true that very careful criticism of her methods may discover their artificiality. “Her heroines voluntarily expose themselves to situations which, in nature, a lonely female would certainly have avoided. They are too apt to choose the midnight hour for investigating the mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage, and generally are only supplied,” like Mr. Pickwick, “with an expiring lamp when about to read the most interesting documents.” But Emily St. Aubert is not surely designed for comparison with even that “imbecility in females” which Henry Tilney declared to be “a great enhancement of their personal charms.” She is a heroine, not a woman; and if, unlike Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe demands, and supplies, a material explanation of all supernatural appearances, she yet allows her imagination to wander freely over the realms of superstitious alarm, wherein the reason of woman cannot presumably hold sway. Certainly, had Emily been less impulsive she would have missed many opportunities of proving herself courageous.

I cannot myself, however, entirely avoid the impression that, in their natural desire for classification, the critics have laid undue stress on Mrs. Radcliffe’s use of Mystery. In the three hundred and four, double column, pages of Udolpho there are, besides occasional voices, only three definite examples of this artifice—the waxen figure behind the veil, the moving pall, and the disappearance of Ludovico. The main plot is really no more than a spirited example of the conventional Romance-plan (in the development of which she is wittily said to have invented Lord Byron)—an involved narrative of terrible sufferings and dangers incurred by an immaculate heroine, of unmeasured tyranny and violence exerted by a melancholy villain, of protracted misunderstandings concerning the gallant hero, with hurried explanations all round in the last chapter to justify the wedding-bells.

Obviously there is no realism here. Everything depends upon conscious exaggeration: whether it be a description of “the Apennines in their darkest horrors,” or of a “gloomy and sublime” castle’s “mouldering walls”; of crime indulged without restraint, or innocence unsullied by the world. Montoni is not more inhuman in his passion than Emily in the “tender elevation of her mind.”

For despite the most solemn warnings of St. Aubert (quoted above), his Emily has far more sensibility than any of Miss Burney’s heroines, and exemplifies the dangerous doctrine that “virtue and taste are nearly the same.” She and Valancourt, indeed, were indifferent to “the frivolities of common life”; their “ideas were simple and grand, like the landscapes among which they moved”; their sentiments spontaneously “arranged themselves” in original verse.

The fact is, that Scott’s startlingly generous estimate suggests several sound conclusions: by dwelling upon the genuine poetical feeling to be observed in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, and the sincerity of her sympathy with nature. Though it has been remarked, with some justice, that “as her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes”; and that, “were six artists to attempt to embody the Castle of Udolpho upon canvas, they would probably produce six drawings entirely dissimilar to each other, all of them equally authorised by the printed description.”

Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), on the other hand, followed the new school in writing simple narratives of everyday life; but she produced little more than a pale imitation of The Man of Feeling (1771), by Henry Mackenzie, the only masculine exponent of “sensibility”; though her Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796) have been frequently reprinted. She aimed at dissecting the human heart, as Richardson had done; and there is, admittedly, a certain melodramatic, and almost decadent, charm in her work.

Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was, certainly, the most prominent of our novelists between Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Being a girl of eleven when Evelina was published, she lived to witness the triumph of Vanity Fair. Living beyond her eighth decade, she produced over sixty books. Having inspired Scott, on his own testimony, to the production of the Waverley Novels, she actually inaugurated, promoted, or established at least four forms of fiction more or less new to her contemporaries.

Like Fanny Burney, she owed much to the enthusiasm and example of a liberal-minded and cultured father: that Richard Lovell Edgeworth who married several of the young persons whom the author of Sandford and Merton had educated for the honour of his own hand. He and Day were notable scholastic reformers, and the influence of their innumerable theories on life and the Pedagogue, largely imported from over the Channel, is everywhere visible in Maria’s work.

Richard Lovell actually collaborated in the two volumes, inspired by Rousseau’s Émile, on Practical Education (1798), and supplied forewords of edification to that marvellous series in which she first proved the possibility of training the young idea by ethical storiettes which were not tracts. That most clumsily named Parents’ Assistant (1801), the Moral Tales of the same year, and the fascinating Frank, are still nursery classics deserving of immortality. We may not, to-day, accept without protest many of the “lessons” which they were designed to enforce; but their sympathetic insight into the nature of the child (with which recently we have been so much concerned), the attractive simplicity and dramatic interest of the direct narrative, set an example, from the very foundations of juvenile literature, which has borne plentiful fruit.

It should be noticed, moreover, in this connection that Miss Edgeworth had already produced a spirited defence of female education (Letters to Literary Ladies, 1795); while she soon followed in the footsteps of Fanny Burney by writing most lively satires on fin de siècle Society, pointed with travesties of French “naturalism,” of which the chief, perhaps, is Belinda, published in 1801; and further extended the scope of the modern novel by the introduction of the finished Short Story, under the attractive heading of Tales of Fashionable Life.

And, finally, besides again collaborating with her father in an Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), she produced that stimulating “Irish Brigade,” which banished the “stage” Patrick from literature, introduced genuine Celtic types, such as Coney, King of the Black Isles; and, by creating the “national” novel, may be regarded as the legitimate parent of what their illustrious author so modestly offered to the public as “something of the same kind for his own country.”

Although just failing everywhere to reveal genius, Miss Edgeworth reflects, with marvellous versatility, all the intellectual movements of her generation. Adopting, and adapting to her own purposes, the “form for women” set out by Miss Burney, she widened its application to the discussion of social and political problems, and was the first to make fiction a picture not only of life, but of its meaning. In fact she forestalled no less for adults, than for the young, that vast array of consciously didactic narrative which threatens, in our own time, to bury beyond revival the original, and the supreme, inspiration of Art in Literature—to give pleasure.

The humour, the pathos, the knowledge of the world, and, above all, the common sense regulating Miss Edgeworth’s work, have not secured her as permanent a popularity as she justly merits. But, if we do not, to-day, frequently read even Ormond, The Absentee, or Castle Rackrent, the occasions which gratefully recall their accomplished author to our remembrance are most astonishingly frequent.

Of Hannah More (1745-1833) most readers probably know even far less than of Maria Edgeworth; and her work can only claim notice in this place on account of the energy with which she followed Miss Edgeworth’s lead in didactic fiction. Accustomed to the society of fashionable blue-stockings (then a comparative novelty in London life), she exposed their foibles with considerable humour in private correspondence; while her plays were cheerfully staged by Garrick. But awakened, in later life, to the sin of play-going, she became known for her vigorous tracts (inspiring, by turns, the foundation of Sunday schools and of the Religious Tract Society), until she published, at sixty-four, her one novel entitled Cœlebs in Search of a Wife.

If this somewhat ponderous effusion does not altogether deserve the satirical onslaught with which Sydney Smith heralded in the Edinburgh its first appearance, we cannot claim for the author any particular skill in construction or much fidelity to real life. It is, in fact, no more than a “dramatic sermon,” and a sermon, moreover, in support of narrow-minded sectarianism. As the reviewer informs us, “Cœlebs wants a wife ... who may add materially to the happiness of his future life. His first journey is to London, where, in the midst of the gay society of the metropolis, of course, he does not find a wife; and his next journey is to the family of Mr. Stanley, the head of the Methodists, a serious people, where, of course, he does find a wife.” That is the whole story. We must submit, in the meantime, to diatribes, pronounced by the virtuous, against dancing, theatres, cards, assemblies, and frivolous conversation, until we are in danger of losing all interest in the persons of the tale.

It is enough for us, in fact, to mark a niche for Miss More in the development of women’s work; only remembering the great service she rendered her generation by a rarely sympathetic understanding of the poor as individual human beings.