The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood (Oxford English Monographs)

oxford english monographs General Editors helen barr hermione lee

christopher butler a. d. nuttall david womersley

katherine duncan-jones fiona stafford

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The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850–1900 Girls and the Transition to Womanhood

SAR A H BI LS T ON

C LARENDON PRESS • OXFO RD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Sarah Bilston 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–927261–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

For my mother in memory of my father

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Kate Flint, first and foremost, for her indefatigable supervision of my work at Oxford. Kate was a prompt reader, a rigorous critic, and a generous friend. Her extraordinary grasp of the field of Victorian studies was and continues to be an inspiration. Helen Small too has had an enormous impact on my work over the last eight years. She brings a formidable mix of intellectual energy, capacious knowledge, and practical advice to bear on everything she reads, and I have benefited more than I can say from her input on this and other manuscripts. Dinah Birch and Regenia Gagnier read this study when it was still in its dissertation form, and their suggestions for further enquiry have shaped the book it has become. I thank them warmly for their scholarly knowledge, careful criticism, and generous support. Three anonymous readers have also had a considerable impact on this book over the last few years. These reviewers of the manuscript pushed me to think harder and more deeply about the subject and suggested important new avenues of enquiry. I am sure the book is all the better for their criticisms. David Cross has read a number of drafts of the chapters over the years, and his extensive knowledge of the period was, and is, both instructive and illuminating. Conversations with Petra Bianchi, Sarah Dredge, Stephanie Kuduk, Stefanie Markovits, Charlotte Mitchell, Leanne Richardson, Bronwyn Rivers, John Sutherland, Pete Swaab, and Shari Sabeti have also contributed significantly to the ideas and structure of this book. I would like to thank them all for their thought-provoking questions and criticisms. I am extremely grateful to the British Academy and the Clothworkers’ Foundation for helping to finance my years at Oxford. For more recent support I thank Clare Hall, Cambridge; the Yale Law School; and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Yale University. I thank the staff at the Bodleian library, the Oxford English Faculty, and Somerville College for their help during my research, and Sophie Goldsworthy and the staff at Oxford University Press for all their hard work on the book.

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I owe huge debts of gratitude to a number of other people for their support over the last eight years, particularly Meryl Docker, Enid Godwin, the Higginbottom family, Clare Jordan, the Markovits family, Ananda Rutherford, and Sam Van Schaik. Above all I thank my mother, Barbara Bilston; my godmother, Patricia Davies; my grandmother, Ada Sheldon; and my husband, Daniel Markovits. Several sections of this book have been published elsewhere. Part of Chapter 3 appears in Women’s Writing as ‘Authentic Performance in Theatrical Women’s Fiction of the 1870s’ (forthcoming); part of Chapter 4 was published as ‘A New Reading of the Anglo-Indian Women’s Novel, 1880–1894: Passages to India, Passages to Womanhood’ in English Literature in Transition, 44 (2001), 320–34. I thank the editors of both these journals for permitting me to reproduce the material. All mistakes, misreadings, and stylistic infelicities in the book are, of course, entirely my own. S. B.

Contents Note on names

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Introduction

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1. ‘Launched into the ocean of life’: navigating the transition to womanhood in 1850s fiction

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2. ‘At the very turn of life’ in 1860s fiction

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3. The transitional stage: theatrical girlhood in 1870s fiction

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4. ‘Coming out’: passages to womanhood in British and Anglo-Indian fiction, 1880–1894

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5. On the threshold: female adolescent experience in fiction of the fin de siècle

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6. ‘A scant but quite ponderable germ’: girls’ growth in Henry James’s The Awkward Age

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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Note on Names Victorian women writers published under a bewildering array of names. Some wrote under their maiden name and later switched to their married name; some fused their married and maiden names together; some used initials; some published as ‘Mrs so-and-so’, with no forenames; some selected a pseudonym (sometimes masculine sounding, sometimes gender neutral, sometimes deliberately ‘feminine’); some published as ‘the author of [their last/most popular] novel’—and many used a combination of the above at various stages in their career. It seems a mistake to adopt one rigid policy in regard to these writers (for example, to use only maiden or married names), and I have therefore tried to use the name most commonly associated with each individual writer. Writers who are well known in our own time (George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë for example) are referenced under the names most commonly used by modern scholars. I indicate the real identity of long-forgotten authors who used a pseudonym and the first names of those who published as ‘Mrs’ as far as I can; unfortunately some of these authors published little and have left us only the briefest record of their lives. The identity of these writers, ‘[resting] in unvisited tombs’, sadly remains a mystery.

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A girl might be married off the day after her irruption, or better still the day before it, to remove her from the sphere of the play of mind; but these were exactly not crudities, and even then, at the worst, an interval had to be bridged. The Awkward Age is precisely a study of one of these curtailed or extended periods of tensions and apprehension . . . Henry James, Preface to The Awkward Age

Introduction ‘What is the awkward age?’1 Long before Henry James’s 1899 novel, ‘the awkward age’ was tentatively used to describe the ‘interval’ between childhood and womanhood in Victorian literature. Different writers called attention to different aspects of the experience. Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen (1876), a story for girls, describes ‘the awkward age’ as essentially the period of puberty, stressing the mid-teen girl’s ‘uncomfortable self-consciousness’ of her developing body: ‘the size of one’s hands and feet prematurely foreshadow the future growth of one’s figure . . . the simple dresses of the unintroduced young lady seem to be perpetually receding from one’s bony wrists above, and shrinking towards the calves of one’s legs below . . .’ This is a stage in which a girl feels painfully divorced from adult women, Ewing suggests, noticing how girls ‘contrast with the assured manners and flowing draperies of Mamma’s lady friends in the drawing-room’.2 Fifteen years later, Christabel Coleridge’s novel Amethyst (1891) describes the awkward age as less a physical experience and more a period in which girls become accountable for their actions. One of the characters warns his wayward sister Una that she is about to lose the freedom of childhood: ‘“You’re getting to the awkward age, and you won’t have a little girl’s privileges much longer. You’d better look out”’ (Amethyst, i. 42).3 L. H. M. Soulsby’s advice text, Stray Thoughts for Girls (1893), meanwhile, provides a reading of the term that anticipates James’s own. Soulsby suggests that the awkwardness of the experience stems from the lack of an obvious social space for the young girl: ‘Most girls on growing up pass through an 1 L. H. M. Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Girls (1893; London: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. v. 2 Juliana Horatia Ewing, Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls (1876; London: SPCK, n.d.), 124. 3 Una has a lover and a worldly cynicism because her mother, like Mrs Brookenham, exposes her daughters to ‘talk’: ‘ “I always make a point of having the children about. That is why they have been so much in the drawing-room, and lost their schooling, poor dears!”’ Christabel Coleridge, Amethyst: The Story of a Beauty, 2 vols. (London: A. D. Innes, 1891), i. 106.

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uncomfortable stage like this, in which neither they nor their friends quite know what niche in life they can best fill—sometimes, because of their own undisciplined characters; sometimes, because the niche itself seems to be lacking.’4 The Awkward Age develops such a ‘scant but quite ponderable germ’ (The Awkward Age, p. xxx):5 James demonstrates the ‘strain’, the ‘complication’, of the fact that a girl who has left the schoolroom lacks a clear location in her home or out of it (AA 17–18). These texts reveal similar concerns about the transition to womanhood. They highlight tensions between the girl and her mother; they suggest that it is a period in which a girl hovers on the edge of her adult identity; and they indicate that the young girl’s assimilation into society is, in various ways, problematic. Yet they also demonstrate a lack of consensus about what the awkward age actually is: is it a period of physical change (although Ewing herself claims that ‘All girls are not awkward at the awkward age’)?6 Is it heightened or even created by familial and social influences? Is it a concept available only to girls of the middle and upper classes (all of the passages quoted above come from literature hardly available to a workingclass reader)? And when does it occur? Joseph F. Kett has argued that the parameters encompassing ‘youth’ were subject to change throughout the century.7 In the early years of the nineteenth century, Kett claims, youth was defined as extending from the middle teens to the middle twenties.8 G. Stanley Hall’s foundational 1904 text, Adolescence, argued ‘that adolescence embraced the long period from puberty to the end of physical growth in the twenties’, but Kett maintains that Hall was not representative of his day nor of the days to come on this issue: ‘From the 1870s, there was a growing disposition to define youth narrowly as the years from fourteen to nineteen, and virtually all of the writers who followed in Hall’s wake equated 4

Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Girls, p. v. Henry James, The Awkward Age (1899; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), hereafter referenced parenthetically as AA. Roman numerals indicate that the quotation comes from James’s Preface. 6 Ewing, Six to Sixteen, 125. 7 Joseph F. Kett, ‘Adolescence and Youth in Nineteenth Century America’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 283–99. Although Kett is primarily interested in American approaches to adolescence, his article gives a good sense of the shifting nature of discourses on the period between childhood and maturity. He includes comment on European literature and on American texts that impacted on British analyses of human development. 8 Kett tends to use ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ as interchangeable terms. 5

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adolescence with the teen years.’9 Meanwhile Soulsby continued to define the awkward age in 1893 as a potentially long-lasting phenomenon, claiming that it is ‘Certainly not any special number of years. It is most frequently found between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven, but some girls never go through it, and some never emerge from it!’10 It was, in other words, terribly difficult to define the awkward age in an era before theories of adolescence gave maturation a recognizable trajectory and a descriptive vocabulary. Carol Dyhouse, whose Girls Growing Up (1981) has become a standard point of reference on the history of Victorian and Edwardian girlhood, suggests that this is more than a semantic problem. There was no such thing as a ‘transition to womanhood’ in the Victorian period, she maintains, because maturity for women involved behaviour that closely resembled modern ‘adolescence’: Maturity for the male sex will be judged in terms of a boy’s ability to make workable occupational choices and to achieve economic independence . . . For girls, on the other hand, ‘maturity’ is likely to be defined in terms of accepting economic dependence on a husband’s pay-packet and the equation of her personal goals in life with maternity . . . Many of those forms of behaviour which society would deem ‘adolescent’ or ‘immature’ for the male sex will tend to be seen as appropriate for women at any age.11

Dyhouse also contends that if women were, in some sense, permanently adolescent, they were simultaneously prevented from undergoing an adolescent phase as a twentieth-century reader would understand it. ‘[I]f adolescence is identified as a transitional phase between childhood and the assumption of “adult” tasks,’ she argues, ‘a hiatus institutionalised to some extent as a period of liberty and choice, then adolescence for girls had relatively little meaning.’12 This book, however, challenges a number of Dyhouse’s assumptions by demonstrating first that Victorian writers commonly 9

Ibid. 293. Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Girls, p. v. Peter Blos notes that ‘adolescence’ itself was first given a shape—which incorporated a gender distinction—during the Renaissance: ‘According to the Shorter English Dictionary (1967), [‘adolescence’] . . . appeared for the first time in the English language in 1482. It was used to refer to the period between childhood and adulthood, extending from fourteen to twenty-five in the male and from twelve to twenty-one in the female.’ Peter Blos, The Adolescent Passage (New York: International Universities Press, 1979), 406. 11 Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981), 117–18. 12 Ibid. 118. 10

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acknowledged the existence of an awkward age, a developmental interval between childhood and womanhood; and second, that women’s popular fictions regularly represented the stage as a phase of relative ‘liberty and choice’. The discourse used to describe the experience was not, of course, fully theorized; it was neither stable nor monolithic. Some writers talk about an awkward age, others a Sturm und Drang; many use the term ‘transition’ and some even use ‘adolescence’ (although this should not necessarily encourage a twentieth- or twenty-first-century reading of the experience, since the term had different and shifting connotations in the nineteenth century). Countless writers describe, more generally, a sense of enlarged horizons; a yearning to participate in the action of the world; a new experience of tension within the family and, indeed, the broader community. These concerns cluster most insistently around representations of girls aged about 15 to 19. The girl who, as Soulsby put it, ‘never [emerges]’ from her awkward age is treated differently from the girl who first enters into the experience; Charlotte Yonge’s Rachel Curtis is a substantively different character from, say, Ethel May (heroines of The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) and The Daisy Chain (1856) respectively). Dissatisfaction, frustration, and yearning are represented as more or less commonplace amongst young girls, but they are enormously troubling in an older woman; as Sally Mitchell remarks in The New Girl (1995), ‘The ascription of immaturity and transition gives [a girl] permission to behave in ways that might not be appropriate for a woman.’13 So, for example, while 25-year-old Rachel is only ambivalently accorded the author’s support, the teenage Ethel’s mutiny is sympathetically attributed to her ‘difficult, dangerous age’ (The Daisy Chain, 54).14 Girls in their mid to late teens are often frustrated and dissatisfied in Victorian women’s texts—and their irritation with the burdens of a woman’s life is invariably treated with sympathy and understanding. Writers drew on a shared set of terms, phrases, and literary quotations when describing the transition to womanhood, terms that highlight commonalities in attitudes to the experience. Longfellow’s 1841 poem, ‘Maidenhood’, was widely quoted in Victorian fiction, 13 Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 25. 14 Charlotte Yonge, The Daisy Chain (1856; London: Macmillan, 1908), hereafter referenced parenthetically as DC.

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advice manuals, magazine articles, and short stories aimed at women and girls; its account of the transition to womanhood seems to have been particularly resonant. The most frequently excerpted lines constitute the third stanza: ‘Standing, with reluctant feet, | Where the brook and river meet, | Womanhood and childhood fleet!’15 Novelists were still using these lines in their titles in the last decades of the century: Sarah Doudney, a contributor to girls’ periodicals and a writer of advice texts, subtitled her Stories of Girlhood ‘The Brook and The River’ in 1877; Ellen Louisa Davies produced Brook and River for the SPCK in 1887; and Emma Marshall, a prolific writer of popular fiction, published The Lady’s Manor: or Between Brook and River in 1896. Longfellow’s poem was almost invariably misquoted on the title-pages of these novels (and throughout literature) as ‘Womanhood and childhood sweet’, but even in this sentimentalized version, the power of Longfellow’s lines inheres in the sense of a hiatus. The poem emphasizes the compelling tension between two opposites: the girl lingers on the line of division, holding youth and adulthood in abeyance. The moment is also so powerful because it signifies the confrontation of choice: this is the point at which the girl must decide ‘What her life is to become’, as W. H. Davenport Adams put it (1883), ‘whether it is to be nobly used or idly wasted and sacrificed’. Adams, a writer of didactic non-fiction, builds on Longfellow’s portrait of girlhood in his account of the importance of the transitional phase: In the Southern Highlands of Scotland . . . lies a well-known scene . . . where, standing on a narrow isthmus, the traveller sees behind him a small mountain loch, and in front a larger basin of shining waters . . . And I have seen in the double picture an image of maidenhood, which seems to connect, like an isthmus, the two periods of girlhood and womanhood . . . [Adams quotes Longfellow] Assuredly, there is no stage of woman’s career which brings with it such a burden of disturbing emotions, anxieties, aspirations, alarms and wishes; there is no stage of graver interest or more serious importance. What her life is to become, whether it is to be nobly used or idly wasted and sacrificed . . . depends upon the preparation and equipment which the maiden has received in girlhood.16 15 Henry W. Longfellow, ‘Maidenhood’ (1841), repr. The Poetical Works of Longfellow (London: Knight and Son, 1854), 145–7; 146. 16 W. H. Davenport Adams, Child-Life and Girlhood of Remarkable Women (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein, 1883), 10–11.

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Adams expresses the hopes and fears of his society when he articulates girlhood as a time in which the individual must negotiate her ‘disturbing emotions’ and ‘aspirations’, shaping herself day by day into a useful, ‘noble’ Victorian woman. Yet even as Adams recommends a conventional end to girlhood—and advises girls on how best to achieve that end—he lingers over the isthmus, the transitional phase between girlhood and womanhood. It may seem to us that a Victorian girl’s options were hopelessly circumscribed, but contemporary commentators regularly described the transition to womanhood as a time of great personal and social significance, a tumultuous period of dramatic possibilities and unproven potential. ‘[S]uch a world of latent possibilities’ seemed present in the phase (as Margaret Oliphant remarked of one 14-year-old heroine’s girlhood).17 In fact, as we shall see, the ‘latent possibilities’ of girlhood were considerable indeed, offering a glimpse into a new world of gender relations. For the time in which an individual confronted adulthood became, increasingly, a phase through which Victorian women writers confronted—and reshaped—contemporary conceptions of womanhood. In much socially conservative Victorian discourse, womanhood was produced by marriage; ‘woman’ almost necessarily meant ‘married woman’. A young girl attained adult status suddenly, almost instantaneously, through the performative ‘I do’ of the marriage vow, a conceptualization of maturation that left little space for emotional growth and development. However, a host of women writers effectively countered such notions of maturity-as-wifehood by plotting and charting the transition to womanhood as an emotional, psychological experience. Novels centring young girls describe in minute detail the travails of ‘coming out’, of re-viewing the world on one’s sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth birthday; tensions with parents and with friends, troubled love relationships, and irritation with the frivolities of the social round contrive to map the period between childhood and womanhood as a phase of psychological change—a stage involving increased introspection, experimentation, and self-reappraisal. Representations of girlhood in many Victorian fictions therefore push in intriguing ways at conceptions of growth as a primarily social phenomenon, despite the fact that the texts often continue to endorse a socially conservative ethos of limited self-expression for women, limited access to education, 17 Margaret Oliphant, Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life (1883; London: Virago, 1984), 44.

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and the primary importance of marriage, maternity, and service in the domestic sphere. Writers who supported such traditionalist ideals were prepared to represent girls yearning for self-actualization and self-determination when they were unwilling to depict women exhibiting these desires; a child should be seen and not heard, a wife should be an angel in the house, but the transitional girl’s rebellious frustration with her enclosed life was regularly portrayed with warm sympathy. Therefore, as this book will argue, the transition between girlhood and womanhood often forms an unusual space or fault-line in conservative women’s accounts of femininity, a site for behaviour that may at times be actually progressive, but that almost always points to the nuanced view such women had of essentialist gender ideologies. Representations of the transitional phase in even highly conservative women’s texts therefore contribute in important (and hitherto unexamined) ways to the broader investigations of women’s identity, role, and condition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, we shall see that discussions of the awkward age in popular women’s narratives helped lay the groundwork for fin de siècle feminist challenges to traditional Victorian gender norms.

victorian girlhood in contemporary criticism Girls, girlhood, and girls’ cultures have been the focus of an enormous amount of recent critical attention. Many of the most wellpublicized studies of girlhood have focused on the ways in which modern young women are silenced as they approach adulthood: psychologists such as Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown (in Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, 1992) and Mary Pipher (in Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, 1994) argue that western cultures encourage girls to repress all they know to be true about themselves as they approach puberty. Such studies also work to uncover girls’ own cultures, arguing that young women often live complex relational lives of which the dominant culture is too-often unconscious. The concern with recovering and understanding girls’ lived experiences is evident in recent literary historical discussions of girlhood also: Mitchell’s The New Girl, for instance, investigates girls’ reading practices in later Victorian and Edwardian literature. ‘I’m not

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particularly interested in what authors were trying to do,’ Mitchell explains, ‘but in what girl readers were taking and using from their stories.’ Mitchell’s analysis of girls’ popular literature is illuminating and wide-ranging, and girls’ experiences are obviously a rich and valuable field of study, but such an approach tells us little about the literary and symbolic function of the girl. Indeed, a ‘girl-centred’ approach like Mitchell’s tends to assume that while girl-readers themselves were subversive and counter-cultural, the adult-writers who created girl-heroines were implacable bastions of the status quo: Mitchell draws a sharp contrast between ‘the fantasies, the dreams, the mental climate, and the desire of girls themselves’ and ‘the advice, exhortation, instruction, and belief about girlhood that adults provided’.18 My book, by contrast, focuses on the place of fantasies and dreams of girlhood in books written by and aimed primarily at adult women readers: it suggests that the figure of the girl and the representation of her ‘mental climate’ often served distinctive literary and political purposes. Representations of what girls wanted to be proved a means of mapping out what women could be; women’s narratives of girlhood thus contributed in important ways to the evolution of an engaged, self-determining, and politically aware female perspective in later-Victorian women’s literature. A number of critics have, over the last two decades, contributed substantially to our understanding of the Victorian girl’s literary landscape. Judith Rowbotham’s Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (1989) and Kimberley Reynolds’s Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (1990) both unearth an enormous range of juvenile texts; both, however, focus primarily on the explicitly propagated ideology of the texts, rather than examining the tensions within them—the fruitful possibilities for dialogue and conflict that lie along this fault-line in female experience. Christina Bouffis’s ‘Where Womanhood and Childhood Meet: Female Adolescence in Victorian Fiction and Culture’ (1994) is an important dissertation that recognizes the ‘liminal’ stage between childhood and womanhood as one invested with a range of anxieties and possibilities by Victorian writers. Bouffis is concerned with the ways in which girlhood is used to express distinctive class-based anxieties in Victorian literature, and in that respect my own book takes a lead from her. 18

Mitchell, The New Girl, 6.

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However, her study engages primarily with canonical writers and includes only subsidiary discussion of the works of authors such as Rhoda Broughton and Margaret Oliphant.19 This book hopes to achieve a more wide-ranging investigation of the hopes and fears surrounding the figure of the girl. Dyhouse’s Girls Growing Up provides an invaluable account of the experiences of, and advice aimed at, Victorian girls, although her study does not (and nor does it seek to) engage specifically with the representation of this figure in fiction. Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone’s collection of essays, The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (1994), focuses more deliberately on literature: Nelson and Vallone are concerned with emphasizing how ‘multivocal’ Victorian girls’ culture could be, and they therefore take the widest possible interpretation of the term ‘girl’: ‘Depending not only upon her age but also upon her class, educational attainments, and marital or biological status,’ the editors note, ‘a “girl” might be what Charlotte Yonge termed a “home daughter” in her early twenties, a wife and mother aged seventeen, or a selfsupporting member of the workforce at twelve.’20 Nelson and Vallone are clearly right to indicate the wide parameters of the term ‘girlhood’ (Mitchell’s The New Girl is predicated on a similar idea).21 And yet, as I hope to demonstrate, while the term was indeed widely used, its application reveals fine calibrations in Victorian conceptions of girlhood. In women’s writing, the middle-class girl’s later teenage years were often surrounded with a discourse of sanctioned awkwardness (physical, emotional, intellectual, social) that distinguishes the phase from (say) the dangerous rebellion of a 25-year-old unmarried woman or the sexual threat posed by a working girl in her early teens.22 My study, in other words, attends to commonalities— trends, dialogues, exchanges—in representations of the transitional phase in particular, which is identified as an important and distinctive subphase of girlhood. To say that the transitional phase is ‘distinctive’ is not to claim that it was clearly or consistently defined, however; many experiences 19 Bouffis’s introductory chapter on ‘The Girl in the Making’ offers an extremely helpful summary of critical writing about the Victorian girl and twentieth-century theories of adolescence. 20 Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (eds.), The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 3. 21 Mitchell, The New Girl, esp. 6–9. 22 I shall discuss the role of class in discussions of girlhood in more detail presently.

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were commonly depicted, while the existence of others was obviously a source of debate.23 The lack of a widely accepted, coherent discourse of adolescence in the nineteenth century may partly explain the comparative absence of critical studies of the transitional phase; scholars have perhaps been deterred by the problem of referring to an adolescent experience before the publication of Hall’s Adolescence and Freud’s theorizations of puberty in 1905.24 Katherine Dalsimer’s Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature (1986) does concentrate on adolescent transitions, although the book is most valuable for its psychological insights; Dalsimer’s literary criticism is generally unsophisticated. She reads works from Romeo and Juliet to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as mimetic accounts of the experiences of early, middle, and late female adolescence, which she defines in resolutely post-Freudian terms; she also pays scant attention to the mediation of the author, of language, or the impact of changing literary conventions. Lynne Vallone’s Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1995) often employs the word ‘adolescence’ (sometimes in quotation marks, sometimes not), although she never explains her use of the term in pre-twentieth-century settings, nor does she define her conception of ‘the girl’. Indeed Vallone, reading literature aimed at an adult audience (Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen) together with texts aimed at children (by Louisa May Alcott and Lewis Carroll, for example), tends to conflate the experiences of childhood, of the later teen years, and of young womanhood as part and parcel of ‘growing 23 The awkward age was not the only era of life that lacked definition, but was the focus of new classificatory efforts: as Teresa Mangum has shown, ‘intuitive ways of defining old age, which took little note of actual birthdates, gradually gave way to quantitative systems of definition’ over the course of the nineteenth century. Teresa Mangum, ‘Growing Old: Age’, in Herbert Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (London: Blackwell, 1999), 97–109; 98. 24 Hall’s efforts to define the stages of growth were preceded by articles such as T. S. Clouston’s ‘Puberty and Adolescence Medico-Psychologically Considered’, Edinburgh Medical Journal, 26 (1880), 5–17, which, Sally Shuttleworth notes, was ‘[o]ne of the first attempts to formalize’ the distinctions between childhood and puberty. Sally Shuttleworth, ‘The Psychology of Childhood in Victorian Literature and Medicine’, in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds.), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 86–101; 89. Shuttleworth’s excellent article traces the emergence of a psychology of childhood in the nineteenth century; Shuttleworth argues that the parameters and characteristics of childhood received ‘unprecedented levels of attention across medical and historical sciences at this period’, although the new understanding of children as beings who could lie, express murderous rage, and experience sexual desire made ‘the question of what it meant to be a child . . . increasingly unclear’ (100).

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up’, an approach that erases the more particular concerns attending the different stages of female development.25 One of the most significant later twentieth-century studies of literary depictions of adolescence is Patricia Meyer Spacks’s The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (1982), a text that seems fully engaged with adolescence as a myth, a culturally and historically specific construct. The question at the heart of the project is not, Spacks remarks, ‘What is adolescence? But, How has adolescence been perceived, remembered, imagined?’26 Yet for all her emphasis on adolescence as a literary and imaginative construct, Spacks—like Dalsimer—approaches fictional representations armed with twentieth-century theories of adolescent development. Literary depictions of youth become essentially mimetic accounts: authorial motivation and literary traditions are sidelined, and the texts are regarded as reflecting a generally universal experience of adolescence. Spacks is in the main pleased to discover that her (broadly psychoanalytic) conceptions are borne out. For example, after providing her own reading of adolescent behaviour in the epilogue, she notes the apparently mimetic properties of the texts with satisfaction: ‘Although these observations derive more immediately from life than from literature, written texts confirm them.’27 Spacks also investigates a lengthy time-frame to help establish a general picture of the literary appeal of the male and female adolescent (she considers 25 Jodi L. Wyett makes a similar point in her review of Disciplines of Virtue in Criticism, 39 (1998), 132–35; 134. Wyett ultimately decides, however, that Vallone’s inability to define the differences between child, girl, and woman stems from the fact ‘that there was, in fact, a negligible ideological distinction between girls and women’ (134), a conclusion I hope to disprove in this book. Catherine Robson’s Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) reveals the particular concerns surrounding the little girl in Victorian literature and culture. Robson traces the myth of the ideal Victorian girlchild back to Locke and Rousseau and, more immediately, to Wordsworth’s constructions of childhood; as the period progressed, she argues, ‘domestic ideology inevitably recast the ideal child as a little girl’ (157). Her final chapter on W. T. Stead and the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ suggests that the little girl became an increasingly corrupt figure towards the end of the century, and was ultimately replaced as a figure of cultural idealism by the young boy. 26 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (London: Faber, 1982), 13. 27 Ibid. 291. I am not the first to question Spacks’s reading. Christina Bouffis remarks: ‘I find her tendency to project twentieth-century views—psychoanalyzing authors such as Dickens and Eliot—flattens distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century concepts of this phase.’ Christina Bouffis, ‘Where Womanhood and Childhood Meet: Female Adolescence in Victorian Fiction and Culture’, diss., City University of New York, 1994, n. 4.

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fiction from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries). This methodology downgrades the force of the specifics of gender, nationality, and class, as well as sidelining the importance of literary conventions and the impact of historically specific social and cultural discourses.28 My own book concentrates on how writers have ‘perceived, remembered, imagined’ the girl’s experience of the transitional phase; it also focuses on representations of British, middle-class girlhood. The near-exclusion of working-class girls from this study obviously warrants explanation. The book focuses on long-forgotten popular novels written by and about women, many of which were published alongside novels we now consider canonical (by publishing houses such as Smith and Elder and William Heinemann). These fictions almost always centre on a leisured and fairly affluent heroine— assumed to be a figure like the reader herself; texts only rarely depict lower-class girls’ experience. Yet beyond this narrow textual explanation, the focus on middle-class experience is a product of my belief that transitional girlhood is in significant measure a middle-class concept in Victorian culture because it depends on the socioeconomic possibility of an interim stage between childhood and adulthood. As Carol Dyhouse points out, working-class girls usually had to take jobs from a very early age: girls in rural areas went into service as soon as they reached 12 or 13, while in towns and cities they often stayed away from school either to help their own mothers or to carry out domestic jobs for other families. This early assumption of adult tasks arguably deprived them of a transitional phase, a stage between schooling and marriage.29 Middle-class girls did 28 Lynne Vallone’s Disciplines of Virtue similarly, in my view dangerously, seeks to trace a narrative about girls’ cultures across two centuries and the literatures of two nations (Britain and America). 29 Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 9–11. For further discussion on advice aimed at working-class girls see ibid., ch. 3. I have focused on middle-class women’s popular fiction because, as I have suggested, these novels were more thoroughly engaged with the interim stage between childhood and womanhood than writing aimed at workingclass girls. However, novels designed to ‘improve’ poorer girls may also portray the teenage years as a period of heightened significance. Emma Leslie’s Kate’s Ordeal (1887) explores the relative merits of domestic service versus shop-work—coming down strongly, as one might expect, on the side of domestic service, in which the girl remains in a home environment. The heroine who chooses the relative glamour of shop-life is forced to realize her mistake. Leslie’s That Vulgar Girl (1887) is another cautionary tale. Esther carelessly leaves the door ajar while she is supposed to be tending her little sister and preparing tea for the menfolk: her sister gets lost, and Esther runs away in shame. These scenes of drama and hiatus create a sense of the teenage

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13

generally experience a limited period of passage, and the novels discussed here frequently hinge their representation of the girl’s maturation on the most visible ceremonial expression of that passage: ‘coming out’. The middle-class girl left the schoolroom, entered the drawing-room and ballroom, and, if particularly wealthy or upper class, was presented at court: novels typically chart the heroine’s experience of her first dinner-party or ball and her ensuing entrance into local society. ‘Coming out’ constituted a social rite of passage, therefore, and provided an important focal point for discussions about the transition to womanhood in Victorian literature and culture. As we shall see, writers increasingly pushed at the meaning of the phrase and thence the concept, experimenting with its intriguing implications of change and passage; however, its centrality in discussions of the transition to womanhood served simultaneously to reenforce the bourgeois character of this evolving concept of girlhood. Concepts of growth and physical development were also difficult to apply in (sympathetic) discussions of working-class women. Catherine Robson notes that working-class girls of 13 to 15 had to be represented as children (or, more particularly, as child-like) in Stead’s 1885 exposé of girl-prostitution, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, in order to appear innocent and thus victims of their aristocratic seducers. ‘[D]eveloping, or developed, womanliness’ suggested sexual promise and thus potentially willing participation in sexual relationships; the success of Stead’s project (he wanted to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16) depended upon disproving stereotypical views of the working-class young woman as promiscuous and painting her, instead, as a child in need of protection.30 While images of the working-class girl oscillated dangerously between experienced street-walker and innocent ‘city arab’ in much Victorian discourse, middle-class young women’s inhabitation of the private sphere, the realm of emotion and feeling, rendered discussions of the interior life and its growth at once possible and, to some degree at least, appropriate. It is for this reason that I turn to narratives of middle-class years as a period of great tension: in Leslie’s stories, a girl typically fails in her first experience of adult responsibilities, attaining a maturer perspective through a kind of baptism by fire. Interestingly, the heroines of these novels tend to be younger—14 or 15 rather than 18, presumably because the working-class girl generally faced adult responsibilities earlier than her middle-class counterpart. 30 Robson, Men in Wonderland, 171. The age of consent was raised from 12 to 13 in 1875 and then, in the Criminal Law Amendment Act (passed in 1885, in the aftermath of Stead’s articles), was finally raised to 16.

14

Introduction

girlhood as producers of a new and evolving conception of the transitional phase as a period of change, experimentation, and psychological development in the later nineteenth century. It is useful, indeed, to bear the class-based character of transitional girlhood in mind when evaluating scenes of youthful experience in nineteenth-century literature, since representations of young girls’ dissatisfactions often express and reflect distinctively middle-class concerns. For instance, scenes of conflict between girls and their mothers are illuminated by advice manuals, which commonly describe the particular irritation experienced by a 17- or 18-year-old girl who, on leaving the relative purpose and direction of the schoolroom, is forced to become her mother’s domestic subordinate once again. Such scenes, in other words, cannot be read simply as evidence of the pervasiveness of disputes between children and their parents during children’s mid- to late-teen years. However, historians of psychology as well as literary critics have traditionally interpreted depictions of youth in much this way, suggesting that they reveal the universality of adolescent turmoil. Norman Keill’s The Universal Experience of Adolescence (1964) takes letters, autobiographies, and diaries from 120 ad to the twentieth century to demonstrate that experiences such as a feeling of identity crisis and tensions with parents are intrinsic to youth. Keill’s decision to ignore (for instance) gender dynamics, the role of class and nationality, the cultural and political concerns of the historical moment, and the impact of writers’ literary self-consciousness on the passages he examines is problematic. Feminist critics may be particularly uncomfortable with using and applying some of the most influential twentieth-century psychological and psychoanalytic theories given, as Carol Gilligan notes, ‘the repeated exclusion of women from the critical theorybuilding studies of psychological research’.31 And, indeed, studies of adolescence from the twentieth century were, until the last few decades, principally concerned with male adolescence: influential psychologists from Hall to Erikson theorize about adolescence per se based almost entirely on the study of male development. Female experience, when included at all, is subsidiary: texts imply that girls’ development is less interesting because it prepares them for a supporting role. Thus, for example, in his 1963 edition of The Psychology of Adolescence, Arthur T. Jersild briefly mentioned girls’ fan31 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1.

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15

tasies to demonstrate the contrasting, tacitly hierarchical ambitions of boys and girls: ‘In his imagination the boy can picture himself in the role of a doctor, a mechanic, or a farmer. The girl can picture herself as a teacher, a nurse, a singer, or a social worker.’32 The use of such theories, then, would seem merely to reinforce, rather than interrogate, the patriarchal structures of the Victorian age. Freudian theories in particular, of course, have provoked considerable feminist debate. Freud famously structured his account of female development around an experience of lack: the girl discovers the absence of a penis, he argued, and then reacts against her mother for making her inferior. She subsequently turns to her father and to men, developing the compensatory desire for a baby. Psychologists and psychoanalysts including Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow, in particular, have, over the last twenty years, sought to reformulate this picture of female development, producing female-authored studies that focus on women and girls. Feminist revisions of psychoanalytic theories continue to concentrate on the girl’s relationship with her mother, but instead of reading this connection as a site of anger and betrayal, they focus on how girls develop and then seek to perpetuate their early and primary identification with their mother. Chodorow in particular argues that because women are usually responsible for child-rearing, girls learn to be ‘like’ their mother, while boys learn to define themselves against her. This basic pattern of child development is reinforced by society, which encourages women to practise and seek intimacy and nurturing. Since men, meanwhile, are encouraged to feel ambitious and aggressive, women turn to other women, who are themselves seeking intimacy: women also then identify themselves with their own daughters, thus perpetuating the process of female identification. Consequently, women have more fluid ego boundaries, such theories suggest, because they are used to relating themselves to and identifying with other women: men, on the other hand, define themselves through difference and individuality, repeating the pattern of separation they experienced when they learned to individuate themselves from their mother. Adrienne Rich has taken this a step further by suggesting that, because all women first identify themselves with another woman, all women are potentially and originally lesbian.33 32 Arthur T. Jersild, The Psychology of Adolescence (1953; 2nd edn., New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), 153. 33 See Nancy Chodorow, ‘Family Structure and Feminine Personality’, in Michelle

16

Introduction

This book approaches all ‘universalist’ or ‘essentialist’ models of psychological experience with caution; it does not psychoanalyse fictional characters, nor does it seek evidence of a modern adolescent experience in Victorian texts. I am unwilling to treat ‘female literary characters . . . as though they were human beings’, as Judith Kegan Gardiner has put it: ‘This approach presumes that good authors create characters who act like real people in their overt behaviour and also in the slips, dreams, and so on, that imply unconscious life.’34 The book does, however, reflect on Victorian ideologies of role-training and female socialization, and on the ways in which literary texts appear to accept, reproduce, or challenge such models, and it finds important intersections between the myths of human development that structured twentieth-century psychoanalysis and nineteenthcentury ideologies of young women’s growth. For example, the reproduction of mothering was clearly at the heart of the Victorian ideal of female socialization, and Chodorow’s theories may therefore be usefully engaged in an analysis of Victorian accounts of female maturation. This is not to say that I view later nineteenth-century heroines as engaged in precisely the psychodrama Chodorow outlines, but rather that Chodorow’s account of mother–daughter relationships identifies the value for a culture of reproduced mothering, outlines the strategies by which mothering can be actively reproduced, and pinpoints the ways in which such an ideology can plausibly be thwarted, derailed, or subverted. Margaret Homans has rightly remarked: ‘To say that a theory is mythic is hardly to diminish its authority for interpreting culture’;35 psychoanalytic theorists are invoked in this book as articulators of the kinds of cultural myths about development that Victorian writers almost inevitably had to negotiate. Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 43–66; Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (London: University of California Press, 1978); Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience (London: Virago, 1977). For a cogent overview of these texts and twentieth-century psychoanalytic theories in general see Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Mind Mother: Psychoanalysis and Feminism’, in Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (eds.), Making A Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1985), 113–45. 34 Kegan Gardiner, ‘Mind Mother’, 118. 35 Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15.

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popular fiction and the canon If it is hard to define ‘the awkward age’, it is perhaps as difficult to characterize the Victorian ‘popular’ novel. Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and a host of other novelists produced fiction that was clearly popular in its own time, but which is viewed as canonical today. In this book, I concentrate both on classic, canonical texts such as Jane Eyre and The Small House at Allington and on novels that were almost as popular in the Victorian period, but that are now rarely read or discussed. Trollope published The Small House at Allington with Smith and Elder, which also brought out the fiction of the now unknown ‘Holme Lee’ (Harriet Parr); he debated an offer from Longman’s, the publisher of Elizabeth Missing Sewell.36 Tinsley Brothers, meanwhile, published novels by Thomas Hardy together with fiction by Isabella Neil Harwood, Bertha Buxton, and Bithia Mary Croker. These women authors are rarely read today, yet their works were well and widely reviewed by the Victorians; Sewell in particular was often compared to Jane Austen and the Brontës. By recovering writers like Lee, Sewell, and Buxton, by tracing their relationships to more well-known authors, this book aims to recover something of the rich complexity of the Victorian literary landscape (a landscape that, as John Sutherland has remarked, ‘has shrunk to Lilliputian dimensions’; the Victorian novel ‘has effectively become a lost continent of English literature’).37 Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens did not write in a vacuum. Their work may fruitfully be reread in the light of a host of other writers who dealt with similar contemporary issues and preoccupations within a similar literary and cultural milieu. This book concentrates in particular on how our concepts of Victorian gender and gender formation may be complicated or even revised by developing a fuller, more fleshed-out conception of ‘The Victorian Novel’. The project is influenced, at heart, by Gillian Beer’s account of the feminist literary historian’s task: Unless we believe in fixed entities—man and woman—we need to be alert to the processes of gender formation and gender change. We cannot construe this in isolation from other elements within a culture . . . 36 For further discussion on Trollope’s dealings with Longman’s see John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 138. 37 John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), 1.

18

Introduction

[T]he informing of the text . . . is not a matter simply of providing ‘context’ or ‘background.’ Instead, it is more exactly in-forming, instantiation— a coming to know again those beliefs, dreads, unscrutinised expectations which may differ from our own but which may also bear upon them.38

While this book aims to bring long-forgotten books back to light, and while it also hopes to refocus contemporary readings of familiar works of literature, it does not seek merely to provide ‘context’. Instead, it uses readings of popular fiction to ‘know again’ how transitional girlhood was described and what it meant to the Victorians; how it was nuanced according to differences of period, genre, location, and class; how a broad range of writers interpreted, contested, and reinterpreted its shifting cultural meanings; and, from thence, how womanhood itself was gradually reconceived in the nineteenth century. Of course, the project of recovering women’s popular fiction has a well-established feminist heritage. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing (1977) is a major early attempt to reclaim lost women writers and to place them ‘in a theoretical framework which treats them as more than the flotsam of popular culture’.39 Showalter’s important and influential work has done much (as she hoped) to ‘establish the continuity of the female tradition from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman’.40 More recent critics have, however, pointed to certain problems in Showalter’s ‘gynocritical’ theory and practice: Ann L. Ardis, focusing on New Woman writing, remarks that Showalter (and Patricia Stubbs, in Feminism and the Novel: Women and Fiction, 1880–1920 (1979)) is over-eager to maintain traditional distinctions between ‘minor’ and ‘canonical’ women writers. She argues that the new standards of judgement essentially replicate the structures of the old. ‘Why, given their commitment to “gynocriticism,” do Showalter and Stubbs reproduce the condescension of posterity toward the New Woman novel, even as they “rescue” a canon of women’s writing from the Sargasso Sea of uncanonized literature?’, Ardis ponders in New Women, New 38 Gillian Beer, ‘Representing Women: Re-Presenting the Past’, in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader (London: Macmillan, 1989), 63–80; 68. 39 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977; London: Virago, 1978); Showalter, ‘Review Essay: Literary Criticism’, Signs, 1 (1975), 435–60; 444. 40 Elaine Showalter, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, in Mary Jacobus (ed.), Women Writing and Writing About Women (London: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 22–41; 34–5.

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Novels (1990).41 Ardis stresses that feminists should avoid perpetuating conventional systems of literary evaluation by substituting one canon for another. Lillian S. Robinson is perhaps the most famous exponent of this argument, contending in ‘“Treason Our Text”: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon’ (1983) that feminists should beware of placing new-found writers in ‘the women’s literature ghetto—separate, apparently autonomous, and far from equal’. Instead, she advises, readers must ‘return to confrontation with “the” canon, examining it as a source of ideas, themes, motifs, and myths about the two sexes’. 42 Broadly speaking, this book is shaped by such revisions of Showalterian gynocriticism. It concentrates on the interactions between popular novels and ‘mainstream’ literature, representing forgotten works as part of a larger literary endeavour, and demonstrating how such works both responded to and themselves directed larger literary and cultural developments. It does not seek to bring lost masterpieces to the world’s attention; rather it aims to reveal that the complicated negotiation and rearticulation of gender roles in novels such as Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss was far from unusual. This is not to say, however, that this book will simply make a claim for the subversive or covert radicalism of all the popular romances it will investigate. A number of feminist critics engaged in the reclamatory enterprise over the last three decades have found that women’s texts express ambivalence about the views on women and gender they explicitly espouse. The radicalism of this ambivalence was a virtual axiom of later twentieth-century feminist scholarship. Tensions—between the views advanced by the heroine and the antiheroine, for example—were typically read as evidence of an effort to articulate submerged anger at stifling patriarchal constraints and to achieve self-determination in the teeth of efforts to ensure feminine dependence.43 More recently, critics have shifted their account of the 41 Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 7. 42 Lillian S. Robinson, ‘“Treason Our Text”: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon’ (1983), in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (1985; London: Virago, 1996), 105–21; 118. 43 Two of the most important investigations of ‘subterranean challenges’ to contemporary norms and the ‘secret message[s]’ encoded in women’s texts are Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1972), 317, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 75. These books have obviously contributed a great deal to feminist literary criticism, providing a generation of readers with the tools to map (and

20

Introduction

conflicts in novels by women writers such as Charlotte Yonge or Eliza Lynn Linton: narrative tensions have been treated not so much as evidence of conservatism or radicalism, antifeminism or feminism, but rather as a sign that the writers were ‘fundamentally conflicted’.44 This phrase is, however, often effectively conflated with ‘subversive’, as in Nicola Diane Thompson’s recent interpretation of Linton’s The Rebel of the Family as ‘confused and transgressive’.45 Ambivalence about contemporary mythologies of gender is still read by many modern critics as evidence of covert radicalism, as if it was impossible to conceive of oneself as a Victorian conservative and yet have doubts or qualms about gender-appropriate behaviour and the separation of the spheres. Yet doubt, of course, was one of the most characteristic features of Victorian intellectual life, affecting the entire spectrum of political opinion, and the difficulty of finding a writer who does not express some element of uncertainty about nineteenth-century essentialist conceptions of gender must caution us against calling such expressions of uncertainty ‘radical’.46 Middleclass Victorian ideology was not, as Mary Poovey has pointed out, a fixed and rigid system, but rather ‘both contested and always under construction; because it was always in the making, it was always open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of oppositional formulations’.47 The instability of socially conservative writers’ responses thus make sense of) texts that rarely conform to the aesthetic standards and political and social concerns of the ‘high’ Victorian novel. 44 Nicola Diane Thompson, ‘Responding to the Woman Questions: Rereading Noncanonical Victorian Women Novelists’, in Nicola Diane Thompson (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–23; 3. Thompson, I should say, is at pains to stress that women writers should not be valued for their transgressions alone (and Victorian Women Writers is a useful contribution to the study of women’s literary and political endeavours), but her critical readings continue to discuss the ways in which writers subvert the ‘apparent [conservatism]’ of their texts and to identify the ‘dialogic interplay of competing voices [that] can be glimpsed below the surface of the plot’ (ibid. 5, 4). My own book contests the view of gender dialogues as subterranean in much Victorian women’s writing, reading them instead as evidence of open intellectual engagement with issues that are sometimes found to be unresolveable. 45 Thompson, ‘Responding’, 5. 46 I first made this argument in ‘Conflict and Ambiguity in Victorian Women’s Writing: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Possibilities of Agnosticism’ (Tulsa Studies, forthcoming). 47 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3. Like Poovey, I conceive Victorian ideology to possess ‘two guises’: ‘apparent coherence and authenticity, on the one hand’ and ‘internal instability and artificiality, on the other’ (3).

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to contemporary gender ideologies should surely not surprise us, given the intrinsic shiftiness of the ideological field and the fact that the concerns, attitudes, and lived experiences of individual writers will be at play as they interact with this ceaselessly shifting (or, as Poovey put it, ‘unevenly developing’) system. This is not to deny the uncomfortable, ambivalent response to high-conservative constructions of femininity in the women’s texts to be discussed here; it is also not to deny that the texts performed progressive cultural work. It is to suggest, indeed, that such responses were at the heart of the texts’ political consciousness, but that the process of rearticulating conceptions of gender was infinitely more fluid and politically nuanced than a term like ‘transgressive’ can possibly capture.

the awkward age This book’s title is taken from a common Victorian phrase for the transition to womanhood;48 it is also designed to indicate that the book combines discussion of women’s popular novels and works by writers such as Henry James—that is to say, works by both male and female authors, famous and neglected, from the later part of the nineteenth century. The book also analyses relationships between long-forgotten novels and those popular fictions that have seen something of a revival in our own time; the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, for example, and the fiction of Charlotte Yonge. Yet it also engages with the construction of a kind of feminist canon: despite Robinson’s warning, recent feminist criticism has tended to venerate certain rediscovered fictions (New Woman novels in particular). I indicate in the last chapter that this has encouraged feminists to ignore other contemporary developments in women’s writing. I uncover a range of evolving literary preoccupations in women’s fiction and compare and contrast these with the concerns of writers like Grand, Caird, and Egerton, thus helping to create a more detailed picture of the conflicts and dialogues between women writers both within a single decade and across a larger time-frame. The book is structured chronologically and, by and large, each chapter focuses on the literature of a different decade. The chapters 48 I only really use the term ‘adolescence’ in the final chapter, which examines fictions of the 1890s. This is because, as I will demonstrate, the term began to circulate more widely at that time, acquiring an increasingly specific meaning.

22

Introduction

also centre on a particular motif or theme that both characterizes the fiction of the period and serves to organize the argument. Thus the first chapter concentrates on mother/daughter relations; the second investigates questions of identity; the third deals with the theme of theatrical transformation; the fourth centres on notions of foreignness and of travel, specifically to southern Europe and British India; the fifth examines intersections between romance and New Woman fictions on the question of sexual knowledge. Finally, the sixth chapter demonstrates that James’s The Awkward Age may be positioned within a much longer tradition of writing about adolescence and girlhood, a tradition that also constitutes an intriguing prehistory to the famous theories of adolescence advanced by Hall and Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century. While my study is substantially engaged with the character and the concerns of the Victorian period, it does not slavishly follow the dates of Victoria’s reign; it rather spans the fall-out from the publication of Jane Eyre through to the publication of The Awkward Age, suggesting that Brontë’s novel initiated an enduring concern about anarchic, questioning female youth, a concern that subsequently informed James’s representation of the isolated Nanda Brookenham. This book’s time-frame also encompasses—and connects—1850s didactic and romance fiction and the New Woman writing of the 1890s, demonstrating important parallels in their representations of awakening female consciousness. The book investigates discussions of the transition to womanhood in a period in which, more than ever, women’s role and sphere in society were profoundly questioned and increasingly restructured: thus it picks the narrative up just before the founding of an organized woman’s movement and follows it to the flood of feminist interest in the 1890s, and the impact on society of a cultural icon, the New Woman. It asks what impact changing models of adult womanhood had on representations of girls just taking up their adult role; it also considers what impact the image of the restless, resistant girl had on cultural conceptions of womanhood. Moreover, the time-frame facilitates some broader conceptual claims about the relationship between the girl and her cultural milieu. The book examines literature from the middle of the century through to literature from a period of transition between the centuries, investigating the relationship between discourses surrounding the developing girl and those concerning wider cultural, social, and temporal transitions. In Britain, one event resonated throughout representations of the

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transition to womanhood for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1837, Queen Victoria ascended the throne, aged 18. For the rest of her reign, didactic manuals and girls’ magazines depicted the terrifying, exciting moment when Victoria was informed in the middle of the night of her new status. The Girl’s Own Paper retold this story as its first article in 1880: ‘“in a few minutes she came into the room in a loose white night-gown and shawl, her night-cap thrown off, and her hair falling about her shoulders—her feet in slippers, tears in her eyes, but perfectly collected and dignified.”’ She was then advised that ‘“the sovereignty of the most powerful nation of the earth lay at the feet of a girl of eighteen”’.49 This image of a girl suddenly acquiring the responsibilities of a queen provided a potent image of the transition to womanhood: it emerged as an iconic moment of profound hiatus in which childhood ends and responsibility commences. Clearly fascinated by the picture, a whole genre of didactic texts told and retold the story of the girlhood of Queen Victoria—and of Joan of Arc, Lady Jane Grey, Florence Nightingale, Mary Somerville, and countless other women.50 What these texts offer the reader, as Martha Vicinus has noted, is the possibility of identifying with just such an extraordinary woman, or more specifically, with ‘the heroic possibilities she represented’. 51 While depictions of the Queen usually (as in the Girl’s Own Paper article) then emphasized her ideal self-abnegation and dutiful wifely submission, the potency of the image of her accession clearly lay in the combination of youthfulness and the attainment of power. This book will argue that women’s novels, which also tend to demonstrate the importance of filial submissiveness and self-abnegation, display a similar interest in combining the ideology of domestic 49 ‘The Girlhood of Queen Victoria’, Girl’s Own Paper, 1 (1880), 5–7; 7. The article was preceded only by the first instalment of a story, entitled Zara: Or, My Granddaughter’s Money. 50 See, for example, W. H. Davenport Adams’s Celebrated Englishwomen of the Victorian Era, 2 vols. (London: F. V. White, 1884), and Rosa Nouchette Carey’s Twelve Notable Good Women of the XIXth Century (London: Hutchinson, 1899). Alison Booth points out that ‘role model anthologies’ had been published since the eighteenth century. However, Booth notes that representations of Victoria in particular helped to explode ‘the supposition that fame and virtue, history and happiness, are incompatible or unattainable for women’. Alison Booth, ‘Illustrious Company: Victoria Among Other Women in Anglo-American Role Model Anthologies’, in Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (eds.), Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59–78; 59, 60. 51 Martha Vicinus, ‘Models for Public Life: Biographies of “Noble Women” for Girls’, in Nelson and Vallone (eds.), The Girl’s Own, 52–70; 53.

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Introduction

womanhood with women’s desires for meaningful public action. In particular, it will reveal that the girl in the transition to womanhood became an exemplary figure in, even a figurehead for, this endeavour. For the girl, standing at the awkward age, offered reader and writer the possibility of remembering a time when self-interest and rebellion were culturally possible, because temporary and transitional; a brief period in which the world and its opportunities might legitimately be evaluated and questioned. The consequences of this process of evaluation and questioning, repeated by numerous young heroines in text after text, decade after decade, turned out to be far reaching indeed.

1

‘Launched into the ocean of life’ Navigating the Transition to Womanhood in 1850s Fiction introduction Reader! Did you ever witness the launch of one of those gallant vessels which form the bulwarks of our country? You may have admired the gracefulness of her fair proportions, her noble form . . . But alas! a spark from a tiny lucifer may kindle flames which no human power can extinguish! A small leak may spring, and ere her crew can find safety she may fill, and disappear beneath the waste of waters! . . . Can we, among all the works of man, find a fitter emblem of human life itself, and especially of the career of a young girl launched for the first time into the ocean of life? Up to that moment she has hardly had an existence of her own—her least action, and her most important one, have been alike dictated by others: now she claims the privileges of womanhood . . . . . . with her intellect still immatured—her mind undeveloped, her principles far from defined or settled, how shall she escape the dangers that surround her? . . . Happily she has a Guide more unerring than ships’ compasses—a Guide and Guard that, duly consulted, will enable her to make the voyage of life in safety.1

Matilda Pullan’s Maternal Counsels to a Daughter (1855) portrays the transition to womanhood as a hazardous period, a stage of life requiring the careful supervision of a watchful ‘Guide’. Pullan never defines exactly who the ‘Guide’ is, whether it is God, or the girl’s mother, or her own Maternal Counsels to a Daughter; all three are 1 Matilda Pullan, Maternal Counsels to a Daughter (London: Darton, 1855), pp. vii–x.

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1850s Fiction

invoked throughout the text as part of the ‘crew’ who will pilot the girl through the transitional stage. Indeed, Pullan’s equivocation could almost be deliberate, since each appears to reinforce the edicts of the other two; ‘maternal counsels’, both oral and textual, are informed by, and given the status of, religious doctrine. Pullan’s vision of girlhood and the position of the mother is far from unusual, of course; most mid-century didactic texts depict mothers as wholesome, regulatory checks on a young woman’s behaviour. Mothers are also the ideal to which a girl must aspire: Pullan states the assumption that lies at the heart of all such texts when she remarks, ‘To become in course of time a wife and a mother, is, we may fairly assume, the ambition and expectation of every young woman.’2 And lest the girl-reader be tempted to forge a new ambition, Pullan opens her text with the vaguely threatening epigram: ‘“The destinies of our race depend more on its future mothers than on anything else.”’3 Positing motherhood as a pattern of selfless virtues, texts like Maternal Counsels aim to ensure an endless perpetuation of Christian womanhood as daughters strive to emulate their mothers and so become selfless mothers themselves.4 As Kate Flint points out, this circular process is re-enforced by manuals that specifically appropriate to themselves a maternal role: these texts implicitly claimed for themselves something of the ideological role of the mother which was constructed within their own covers, bonding the reader, at least in theory, into a framework of categorical self-definition: learning, and playing out, the part of the receptive yet obedient daughter, and thus ensuring the transmission of values and practices from one generation to the next.5

Yet the advice offered in advice texts is not just directed at girls; texts position themselves as sometimes maternal, sometimes sororal, advising the mother even as girls are adjured to revere their mother’s 2

3 Ibid. 3. Pullan frontispiece (by Rev. T. Binney). My analysis here is indebted to feminist psychoanalytic theories of mothering (as discussed in the Introduction). Chodorow argues: ‘Girls are taught to be mothers, trained for nurturance . . . They “identify” themselves with their own mothers as they grow up, and this identification produces the girl as a mother . . .’ Chodorow maintains that, in the western middle-class, this system perpetuates female subjugation: ‘For the daughter, feminine gender identification means identification with a devalued, passive mother . . .’ Nancy Chodorow, ‘Family Structure and Feminine Personality’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 65: Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (London: University of California Press, 1978), 31. 5 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 71. 4

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neo-divine authority. Some manuals signal their dual address from the outset: for example, Anne Bowman’s The Common Things of Every-Day Life (1857) is subtitled ‘A Home Book of Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters’. Bowman combines hymns to majestic motherhood with practical counsel on the training of children, instruction to girls on health and social etiquette, and advice to mothers and daughters about negotiating conflicts of interest during the transition to womanhood (‘It sometimes happens that an active mother is unwilling to relinquish the bustle and importance of absolute government, by allowing her daughters to share her duties . . .’).6 Matilda Pullan also anticipates a mixed readership: at the end of Maternal Counsels she includes a section entitled ‘To Mothers’ which contains both sentimental paeans to the ‘sucking child’ and more practical advice on choosing a suitable governess for a teenaged daughter.7 For all their explicit celebrations of mothers as the perfect disseminators of Christian advice and the ideal incarnation of Christian womanhood, then, these texts assume some level of need and inadequacy on a mother’s part. Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Bertha and Lily (1854) argued that women were unable to function as effective moral preceptresses because they were weary from child-bearing: The mother is not the best teacher to her children, in the present aspect of society. She is exhausted with the pangs of maternity. She is oppressed and servile with much bearing, as was Leah—her children fret and annoy her— whereas the teacher should be calm, cheerful, self-sustained.8

As Pullan put it, the girl’s Guide must be ‘more unerring than ship’s compasses’ to help her daughter achieve orthodox womanhood. If the mother is oppressed, fretted, and annoyed, the ‘unerring’ didactic text plausibly comes into its own as a means of supplementing and supporting her role. And that role is presented as particularly complex and challenging, particularly in need of external support, given the modern girl’s ambivalence about reproducing her mother’s choices. Mid-Victorian writers like Pullan often suggested that girls were re-examining, 6 Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life: A Home Book of Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (London: G. Routledge, 1857), 176. 7 Pullan, Maternal Counsels, 295–6. 8 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Bertha and Lily; or, the Parsonage of Beech Glen (London: Aird and Tunstall, 1854), 46. Smith was an American women’s rights campaigner. The passage in the text was quoted, with great ire, in an article on the ‘The Rights of Women’ (Christian Remembrancer, 30 (1855), 1–47), which will be discussed presently.

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and possibly rejecting, the conventional duties of wife- and motherhood.9 Margaret Oliphant was one of a number of socially conservative writers to attribute the rebellious spirit amongst girls to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Oliphant argued that Brontë’s independent-minded heroine, ‘free’ from the regulation and guidance of a mother, set a bad example for the modern young woman by questioning traditional patterns of romance and courtship: The man who presumed to treat [Jane] with reverence was one who insulted her pretensions; while the lover who struggled with her, as he would have struggled with another man . . . was the only one who truly recognised her claims of equality . . . These are the doctrines, startling and original, propounded by Jane Eyre; and they are not Jane Eyre’s opinions only, as we may guess from the host of followers or imitators who have copied them.10

Oliphant’s reference to ‘the host of followers or imitators’ emphasizes the potency of the novel, its impact on mid-Victorian literature and culture.11 Kelly Hager has argued that both Charlotte and Emily Brontë played a key role in the developing discourse of sexuality because ‘they have defined for us what we now unthinkingly call adolescence. They have plotted the passage between childhood and maturity; they have narrated the force of an emerging sexuality; and they have given us a language for the emotion.’12 Of course, what 9 Of course, conduct manuals by their very nature seek to ensure the perpetuation of gender- and class-based values through the generations, as many critics have argued. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) is a particularly influential discussion of the ways in which an ideology of domestic womanhood was formulated through eighteenth-century conduct manuals; see esp. ch. 2. Kate Flint examines Victorian didactic non-fiction in ch. 5 of The Woman Reader, emphasizing that ‘the dominant order which is served is, inevitably, the patriarchal order of the Victorian and Edwardian bourgeois economy, co-joined, in the later decades of the century, to the demands of nation and empire’ (72). Thus I do not claim that the mid-century manuals examined here were unusual in their political project; I seek instead to identify the ways in which they manifested their concerns about modernity and change. 10 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Modern Novelists Great and Small’, Blackwood’s, 77 (1855), 554–68; 557–8. 11 For further discussion see Sheila Foster, Victorian Women’s Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual (London: Croom Helm, 1985), and Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Harvester, 1996). Foster lists about fifty Victorian novels written after Jane Eyre which take a similar theme and demonstrate similar preoccupations; Stoneman traces the impact of the Brontës’ fictions into the twentieth century. 12 Kelly Hager, ‘Inventing Adolescence, Remembering the Brontës’, Remembering the Victorians Panel, NVSA Conference on Victorian Memory, Yale University, New

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strikes many modern readers of Jane Eyre is the comparative absence of an adolescence; Jane is certainly a rebellious child, but during her later years at Lowood and while working for Rochester at Thornfield she displays few of the characteristics we have come to associate with an adolescent experience. Jane’s prosaic assumption of adult tasks and responsibilities could, indeed, be taken to indicate that the questioning and turmoil of the awkward age was very much a leisured young woman’s phenomenon. Yet clearly Jane Eyre disturbed readers like Margaret Oliphant with its account of premarital sexual desire, and I suggest that the shock Oliphant articulates is caused not simply by prudishness, but also, and more importantly, by the novel’s assault on contemporary conceptions of the transition to womanhood. Rebuffing ideals of female desire as created by and limited to a social contract, Brontë’s text represents maturation for women as a complex emotional and physiological process that occurs outside of marriage. In this way, as Hager says, she finds a new way to ‘[plot] the passage between childhood and maturity’. Oliphant advocates innocence, purity, and clinging dependence in girlhood, and she is therefore horrified by Brontë’s representation of a young woman who (as she euphemistically puts it) ‘has no patience with your flowery emblems. Why should she be like a rose or a lily any more than yourself?’13 Like many Victorian conservatives, Oliphant believed for much of her life that the ideal of feminine purity chastened men, stimulating them to behave better and thereby improving the moral character of society as a whole. Jane’s knowledge of extramarital sex (Rochester’s account of his amours neither shocks nor surprises her), her steady progress towards self-knowledge and resolute self-determination (‘“I care for myself”’ (Jane Eyre, 334)) represents a threat to social as well as literary ideals of unmarried girlhood as a time of innocence and compliance:14 [We had an] ideal . . . in the old halcyon days of novel-writing; when suddenly there stole upon the scene . . . a little fierce incendiary, doomed to turn Haven, Conn., 17 Apr. 1999 (unpublished manuscript, 10). Reproduced by kind permission of the author. 13 Oliphant, ‘Modern Novelists’, 558. These flowers are, of course, symbolic of the Virgin Mary. For an 1850s analysis of Marian iconography see Anna Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, As Represented in the Fine Arts (London: Longmans, Brown, Green, 1852). For a more recent examination of the association of Mary with flowers see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976; London: Picador, 1985), esp. 99–100 and 307. 14 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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the world of fancy upside down. She stole upon the scene—pale, small, by no means beautiful—something of a genius, something of a vixen—a dangerous little person, inimical to the peace of society . . . Such was the impetuous little spirit which dashed into our well-ordered world, broke its boundaries, and defied its principles—and the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.15

Oliphant aims to minimize the impact of Jane’s behaviour, to dismiss it as mere childishness; she succeeds in equating girlhood with absolute anarchy. (Indeed, and ironically perhaps, her vision of Jane chimes more with modern conceptions of the adolescent than does Brontë’s own portrait of her heroine.)16 Jane, Oliphant indicates, heralds the arrival of a new generation of young women who not only insisted on the right to choose a companionate love relationship, but who also chose to gain the knowledge (of self and of the world) necessary to make an informed decision. This reconceptualization of girlhood is, Oliphant suggests, revolutionary.17 In the wake of the publication of Jane Eyre, terms of insurrection and anarchy were often used in discussions of young womanhood. For example, dramatic and violent images of invasion and revolution are employed by the Christian Remembrancer in a piece on ‘The Rights of Women’. Like Oliphant, the author of the article images the gender arena as a battleground, criticizing Bertha and Lily for representing girls who refuse to accept their mothers’ model: ‘The sacred rights of maternity are . . . invaded.’ ‘The Rights of Women’ frames itself as a review of recently published texts, although it is really a polemical piece about the future of ‘our well-ordered world’ in light of girls’ recent social and political activities. The author aims 15

Oliphant, ‘Modern Novelists’, 557. It should, however, be noted that Aristotle uses similar terms to describe youth in The Rhetoric: ‘The young are in character prone to desire and ready to carry any desire they may have formed into action . . . They are passionate, irascible, and apt to be carried away by their impulses . . . They regard themselves as omniscient and are positive in their assertions . . .’ Qtd. in Vivian C. Fox, ‘Is Adolescence a Phenomenon of Modern Times?’, The Journal of Psychohistory, 5 (1977), 271–90; 274. 17 Of course, writers before Charlotte Brontë had clearly conceived of girlhood as a period in which knowledge of the world and of the self is gained; Jane Austen’s heroines are famously interrogative and questing. Yet if Austen’s protagonists tend to grow towards rationality, Jane grows into an increased awareness of her physical self; few heroines (as opposed to antiheroines) before Jane had so openly proclaimed their developing consciousness of human sexuality and their own experiences of passion. For further discussion on the perception of Jane as a revolutionary heroine see Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1977; London: Virago, 1978), 122–3; Patsy Stoneman examines the use of revolutionary rhetoric in contemporary reviews of the novel (Brontë Transformations, 7–9). 16

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to locate such turmoil primarily in America, quoting from an account that relates how ‘pretty girls in their teens’ participated in the Syracuse women’s rights’ convention. However, the writer notes with horror that ‘our own countrywoman’ has entered the debate, glossing Bessie Rayner Belloc’s (née Parks) Remarks on the Education of Girls (1854): The rights . . . of the matron are infringed . . . She is denied authority over her sex. Young women are promoted over her head. Mere girls are assured that everything depends on them; that they must look into the present laws concerning women, with a view to a truer union between husband and wife, ‘because all points connected with this subject are the legitimate interests of young women; it depends on them to mould public opinion on this point.’18

Oliphant was horrified by changes in patterns of fictional romance: this writer is shocked by the idea that girls should re-examine patterns of courtship and marriage in everyday life. Both authors paint a picture of ensuing anarchy. Aghast at the suggestion that girls are to make up their own minds about marriage rather than deferring to their mother’s example, the writer draws a picture of an increase in ‘men-like women’ and deformed babies for the next generation. ‘The destinies of our race depend more on its future mothers than on anything else’; girls hold the health and success of the nation in their hands. The reproduction of mothering, the acceptance of a mother as one’s Guide to adulthood, appeared the best means of ensuring a morally and physically sturdy British population. Didactic fictions are often viewed as little more than seductively packaged versions of didactic advice manuals. Didactic novels were ‘the tools that . . . society hoped and believed would be successful in controlling’ women’s efforts to expand their role, Judith Rowbotham remarks, reading the genres as essentially the same phenomenon in a chapter on ‘Religion as a Control on Reality’.19 Yet comparisons between the genres reveal interesting differences: while non-fictional manuals typically assume the existence of a mother, fictions invariably represent their heroines as motherless or inadequately mothered. Given the texts’ explicit commitment to the maintenance and perpetuation of conservative values, one might reasonably expect to find close, idealized relationships between 18

‘The Rights of Women’, 6, 16, 25, 25–6. Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 54; ‘Religion as a Control on Reality’, 53–98. 19

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mothers and daughters centred at the heart of such narratives, relationships that demonstrate the attractiveness of reproducing a mother’s choices. The motherlessness that in fact characterizes many mid-Victorian women’s novels is, of course, a common enough plot device in literature, and Victorian and twentieth-century commentators alike have drawn general conclusions about the phenomenon. Most agree that it enables the heroine (even more than the hero) to display greater independence, and that this promotes the narrative interest of the text. In 1852, Florence Nightingale explained one of the key features of a good novel: ‘the heroine has . . . no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.’20 More recently, Susan Peck MacDonald has argued that maternal absences are crucial if a novel is to explore the trials of the transition to womanhood because mothers are such influential figures: The absence of mothers . . . seems to me to derive not from the impotence or unimportance of mothers, but from the almost excessive power of motherhood; the good, supportive mother is so potentially powerful a figure as to prevent her daughter’s trials from occurring, to shield her from the process of maturation . . .21

The ‘almost excessive power of motherhood’ served a political as well as a literary purpose for the Victorians, I suggest, constituting an important social means of reproducing mothering. Novels therefore complicate the perpetuation of gender norms in the world of their texts by removing mother figures; maternal absences form a means of negotiating the limiting character of the mother/daughter bond. While the moderately progressive possibilities of this narrative pattern may not surprise us in the work of Charlotte Brontë, they may seem more unexpected in the writings of a heavily didactic conservative author like Charlotte Yonge. Yet, in fictions by preeminent didactic writers including Yonge, Elizabeth Missing Sewell, and Dinah Craik, literary maternal absences prevent heroines from copying their mothers’ life choices, and growth is subsequently figured as a personal journey—a lengthy, complex process in which maturity is a product of self-assessment, self-awareness, and self20 Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (1852); qtd. in Stoneman, Brontë Transformations, 17. 21 Susan Peck MacDonald, ‘Jane Austen and the Tradition of the Absent Mother’, in Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner (eds.), The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980), 58–69; 58.

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regulation. This is not to say that growth can easily be conflated with adolescence in such texts, however; the ‘overassertion of individuality’ displayed by G. Stanley Hall’s adolescent (and most subsequent twentieth-century accounts of the subject) is either entirely absent or, if present, a source of grave concern.22 The girl who lacks a mother is rather encouraged to seek advice from other female guides—aunts, friends, or woman-authored texts. Didactic novels contrive to offer girls a varied range of counsel, support, and models with whom to identify as they navigate the transition to womanhood. As we shall see, didactic fictions thus illustrate and elaborate upon the problem didactic non-fictions merely identify; namely, the disconnect between ideals of mothers as saintly, perfect guides of their growing daughters and anxieties about women’s actual experiences of the transitional stage.

mothers replaced: the guiding li ght of didactic fiction The transition to womanhood is the warp on to which the weft of many didactic plots is woven, for reasons Elizabeth Missing Sewell’s heroine makes clear in The Experience of Life (1853): It is interesting, whilst looking back upon one’s past life, to trace, as one often can, the words and seemingly trifling incidents which have left lasting effects upon the character. It makes the existence of every day much more important; for who can avoid reflecting upon the amount of good or evil for oneself or others, which may be involved in petty occurrences and passing observations, when experience has warned us of their consequences? Perhaps there is no age at which this formation of the mind from common circumstances goes on so rapidly as in the transition state between childhood and womanhood,—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. (The Experience of Life, 153) 23

Like Matilda Pullan, Sewell stresses the hazards of the transitional phase: it is a time in which an individual is especially receptive to outside influences, she suggests—a dangerous characteristic, since it is also the stage in which a girl’s character receives its adult stamp. 22 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1904), i. 315. 23 Elizabeth Missing Sewell, The Experience of Life (1853; London: Longmans, Brown, Green, 1858), hereafter referenced parenthetically as EL.

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Didactic fictions, which work to stress the importance of developing a Christian character, typically focus on a period in which the character is at its most pliable, and a surprisingly serious engagement with the psychological complexities of growing up is the result. Conceiving maturity as a psychological state rather than a social position, didactic novels minutely narrate the characteristics of, and staging posts along, the transition to adulthood. Motherlessness throws the dark days of growing up into sharp relief. If the condition of childhood is happy, secure innocence, a mother’s untimely death allows an author to introduce the long shadows of the teenage years. It is, in a sense, a second birth—a second leaving of the mother’s warm, comforting, protective body. Charlotte Yonge consequently narrates the death of the ideal Mrs May in the early pages of The Daisy Chain (1856), stressing that all the May children—but especially 15-year-old Ethel—are bewildered by the loss of their spiritual guide. Growing up is now something the children have to work out for themselves, and Margaret (the eldest, and seriously ill, daughter) fears that her younger sister’s character development will inevitably suffer: ‘Dear, dear Ethel, how noble and high she is! But I am afraid! It is what people call a difficult, dangerous age . . . Mamma trusted to me to be a mother to them; papa looks to me, and I so unfit . . .’ (DC 54–5). This type of lament is common in didactic fiction: while motherlessness is a standard plot device, it is invariably accompanied by discourse on the constructive influence of a good mother and the potentially disastrous effects of motherlessness. ‘Remember how young, and innocent, and motherless she was!’ is a typical means of celebrating an orthodox ideal and, furthermore, of excusing a heroine’s moral blunder (Ruth, 56);24 yet, as Margaret Oliphant noted, it is also a way of actively exploring ‘any unusual lapse from feminine traditions’.25 Oliphant’s use of the word ‘tradition’ is significant, evoking a sense of intergenerational connection; the traditions passed down from one generation to the next are interrupted by motherlessness. The sense of disrupted transmission is graphically depicted in The 24

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s, 102 (1867), 257–80; 265. The full passage reads: ‘Ill-brought-up motherless girls, left to grow up anyway, out of all feminine guardianship, have become the ideal of the novelist. There is this advantage in them, that benevolent female readers have the resource of saying “Remember she had no mother,” when the heroine falls into any unusual lapse from feminine traditions . . .’ 25

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Daisy Chain in the form of a part-finished letter, written by Mrs May before her death, as an account of her children’s strengths and weaknesses and her hopes for their future moral progress. The incompleteness of the letter signals that Mrs May’s values are only partially imparted to her family: Ethel in particular, caught at her ‘difficult, dangerous age’, subsequently struggles to reconcile her burgeoning need for purpose in life with, as Margaret puts it, the necessity of becoming ‘“a useful steady daughter and sister at home[.] The sort of woman that dear mamma wished to make you, and a comfort to papa”’ (DC 163). The narrative interest of Ethel’s life stems from the fact that she finds the ideal so difficult to achieve; that, without her mother to help her conquer her ‘harum-scarum nature, quick temper, uncouth manners, and heedlessness of all but one absorbing object’ (DC 44), she finds it difficult to resign personal ambitions in favour of the family’s needs. An incompetent mother tends to have a similar effect on the development of plot and character in didactic fiction; girls who do not actually lose their mothers often discover, during their late teen years, their mothers’ limitations. This initiates a process of alienation that both produces and highlights a daughter’s new independence. Thus, for example, Sally Mortimer’s teenage years are marked by the struggle to cope with the importunate demands of the inner life without maternal guidance. Sewell’s first-person narrator stresses that ‘Girls of fifteen and sixteen are much deeper thinkers, and have much quicker perception than the world in general gives them credit for’ (EL 65): Mrs Mortimer is, however, hardly able to deal with her daughter’s intellectual curiosity. Well motivated and even religious, she is quiet, easily manipulable, and reticent to a fault. Sally consequently emphasizes that her mother has had little influence on her psychological development: ‘habitual reserve in her case counteracted much of the good which I might have derived from being with her’ (EL 153). Mrs Mortimer finds the topic of marriage particularly difficult to broach, and Sally mourns that ‘my dear mother’s silence, and known indifference upon the matter’ inhibited conversation (EL 154). Three years before the publication of Sewell’s novel, Elizabeth Gaskell had stressed the serious dangers of non-communication on matters of love and marriage between mother and daughter in Ruth (1850): the heroine, she remarks, ‘was too young when her mother died to have received any cautions or words of advice respecting the subject of a woman’s life’ (Ruth, 44). Ruth is, of course, subsequently

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seduced and bears a child out of wedlock. Sally Mortimer, less disastrously, turns to her Aunt Sarah, who introduces her to a more active and articulate form of Christian worship. Aunt Sarah, who also shapes her niece’s views on marriage, simultaneously provides her with a successful model of single womanhood, which Sally in her turn adopts. For the motherless plot is typically a story of both separation and connection. The archetypal didactic narrative is constructed around the experience of, in the first place, either losing or learning to distinguish oneself from one’s mother, followed in the second place by the search for a new guide or guiding principle. Ethel May becomes devoted to church-building schemes after her mother’s death: her increased religious zeal gives her a sense of purpose, providing an acceptable outlet for her independent and energetic nature.26 Religion’s ability to provide purpose and connection is not, of course, confined to the didactic novel (strictly defined); Gaskell’s second heroine, Jemima Bradshaw, turns to the increasingly saintly Ruth, Jane Eyre finds consolation from Helen Burns and Miss Temple, while George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, at the beginning of the next decade, turns to Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Indeed, Eliot makes the dual pattern (of individuation and new connection) clear in her description of Maggie’s reading experience: while the girl finds empowerment from a new feeling of independence (‘here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things—here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul’ (The Mill on the Floss, 290)),27 she is also profoundly moved by a sense of having discovered lives akin to her own: ‘A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor’ (MF 289). Maternal absences or defects prepare heroines for a religious awakening by introducing a sense of need and lack, laying the ground simultaneously for a development in which the self actively seeks instead of being passively led. For while marriage and motherhood were the ordained choice of the young girl, the (apparently) inexorable turn of the wheel, texts emphasized that a Christian life 26 Yonge’s novel ultimately celebrates a relatively narrow conception of womanhood—contentment is predicated upon confidence of reward in heaven. I shall discuss the limitations of a Christian narrative of growth in more detail presently. 27 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), hereafter referenced parenthetically as MF.

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involved agency and complex self-regulation: ‘the watchful inward eye [must keep] guard over the pure spring of the inward life’ (Ivors, i. 46).28 Didactic novels thus present maturation as a challenging personal journey. Heroines discover that spiritual growth requires careful self-evaluation: daily trials mark and test her progression, providing a measure and a discourse for growth. Didactic novels’ intense concern with psychological development distinguishes them from many socially conservative accounts of growing up, in which middle-class girls are drafted into the category ‘adult’ through the two rites of passage, ‘coming out’ and then (ideally soon thereafter) marriage. The girl’s participation in her first ball or dinner-party was an essentially performative act: her presence at such events did not necessarily facilitate or even, for that matter, announce her maturity, but rather constituted her immediate passage into marriageable womanhood. The wedding ceremony, another performative act, completed her transition to full social maturity. In didactic literature, Christianity complicates this progression in several ways. First of all, it focuses ultimately on a relationship with God, not man: maturity can, therefore, be independently achieved (‘My course and aim are straight on,’ remarks Ethel, ‘and He will direct my paths’ (DC 594)). Second, it reinterprets secular events as stages on a spiritual progression. The ‘seemingly trifling incidents’ of everyday life take on a larger and more profound meaning when they are represented as conflicts between good and evil, with one’s character as the battleground. So, for example, Ethel’s character is gradually ‘softened’ by a series of events and occasional tragedies: the first is, of course, her mother’s death, but this is succeeded by mishaps and character-building incidents such as forgetting to keep an eye on her wayward little brother and having to give up Greek. Indeed, didactic plots are positively characterized by their portrayal of (to borrow from Virginia Woolf) the impact of ‘innumerable atoms’ and ‘trifling incidents’ on the heroine’s character.29 Sewell self-consciously rejects contemporary narrative structures as 28 Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Ivors, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Brown, Green, 1856). 29 I refer here to Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’. Woolf argues, rather like Sewell, that fiction should describe the ‘reality’ of everyday life. She emphasizes the ‘definite impression’ that may be ‘stamped’ by ‘trifling incidents’: ‘From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms . . .’ Collected Essays, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1925; 1967), ii. 106.

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inadequate for representing the diffuse events of everyday life: she argues at the beginning of The Experience of Life that her narrative will not contain (like most novels) ‘one prominent object, in which all the interest is concentrated’. Instead, and like Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), The Experience of Life is framed as the story of a life lacking in grandeur and epic. Like Middlemarch too, the narrative validates these experiences and stresses the incalculable effect of those whose lives have, by society’s standards, been essentially inactive; of those who have, as Eliot was to put it, ‘lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’ (Middlemarch, 896):30 For one person whose life has been marked by some very striking event, there are hundreds who pass to their graves with nothing to distinguish the different periods of their probation, but the changes which steal upon them so naturally as scarcely to occasion a momentary surprise. They hope and enjoy, they are disappointed and sad, but no one points to the history of their lives as containing warning and example. They are born unthought-of beyond their own immediate circle, and die lamented only by a few . . . (EL 1)

Clearly insisting on the solemnity of women’s lives as intensely lived moral existences, didactic novels placed the female consciousness and its evolution centre stage. Indeed, the desire to uncover and relate women’s dawning experiences of life makes them clear, if surprising, precursors to fin de siècle feminist evocations of women as terra incognita. Compare Sewell’s narrator’s decision to include the details of her youth—‘Those I have mentioned have been selected because, although trifling in themselves, they stamped a definite impression upon my, as yet, unformed character, which I can trace to this hour’ (EL 17)—with Sarah Grand’s defence of her portrayal of Beth in The Beth Book (1898): ‘Each incident that she remembered is apparently trifling in itself, but who can say of what significance as an indication?’ Grand tacitly engages with those who reject representations of the intimate details of female life—as critics have done in our own time—as ‘insular’ and ‘parochial’, stressing the significance of a woman’s psychological development: 31 ‘It would be affectation . . . to apologise for such detail. Nothing can be trivial or insignificant that tends to throw light on the mysterious growth of our moral and intel30

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872; London: Penguin, 1965). I refer to the debate sparked by Lola Young’s comments on the fiction submitted for the Orange Prize, May 1999. For a comparison of Young’s responses with those of 1890s reviewers of New Woman fiction see Elaine Showalter, ‘Written Off’, Guardian, 11 May 1999. 31

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lectual being’ (The Beth Book, 11).32 One assumes that Sewell would have agreed: while she was concerned with the growth of a specifically Christian character, like Grand she emphasized the importance of developing strong values and a moral character. Both authors insist on women’s potential for probity, tacitly rejecting notions of the flightiness or superficiality of the female mind. And that flightiness and superficiality is further negated by stressing that erratic and unruly behaviour is a normal, even inevitable, part of the maturational process. One of the most famous 1850s evocations of teenage girls as capricious and disruptive is Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), of course: ‘“those blonde jeunes filles—so mild and meek—I have seen the most reserved—romp like boys, the demurest—snatch grapes from the walls, shake pears from the trees,”’ M. Paul tells Lucy of his pupils, although Lucy quickly discovers for herself (as the protagonist of The Professor did before her) ‘the wide difference that lies between the novelist’s and poet’s ideal “jeune fille,” and the said “jeune fille” as she really is’ (Villette, 454, 142).33 In the field of the didactic novel, Dinah Craik is a particularly sympathetic narrator of the stages of female development; Olive (1850), a story of a young, mistreated disabled girl and her artistic abilities, forms an especially strong defence of girlish erraticism (which, again as in Villette, is firmly distinguished from genuine moral turpitude).34 Early in the novel, Craik describes Olive’s powerful feelings for a young girl named Sarah. Craik stresses that passionate love between friends is inevitable during girlhood, and she advises parents to sympathize with their teenage daughters’ awakening emotions:35 There is a deep beauty—more so than the world will acknowledge—in this impassioned first friendship, most resembling first love, the fore-shadowing 32 ‘Sarah Grand’ (Frances McFall), The Beth Book (London: William Heinemann, 1898), hereafter referenced parenthetically as Beth. 33 Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; London: Penguin, 1979). 34 Olive’s mistakes (for example, her excessive attachment to her friend Sarah) are attributed to the outpourings of a warm heart and not to superficiality or coquettishness; this importantly distinguishes her from Sarah or (for example) Charlotte Brontë’s Ginevra Fanshawe. 35 Modern psychologists emphasize that extra-familial interests are an important feature of the adolescent stage: ‘the development of relationships outside the family allows the individual to move, ultimately, from the family in which he or she was a child to a family in which he or she is a parent.’ Katherine Dalsimer, Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Works of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 9.

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of which it truly is . . . Many a mother, with her children at her knee, may now and then call to mind some old playmate, for whom, when they were girls together, she felt such an intense love . . . Then the delicious meetings— sad partings, also quite lover-like in the multiplicity of tears and embraces— embraces sweeter than those of all the world beside . . . (Olive, 67–8)36

It is impossible to tell how far Craik recognized the eroticism of Olive’s passion: she must have been partly conscious of the sexual undertones of the girls’ relationship since she is at such pains to characterize their behaviour as ‘innocent’.37 The reference to a ‘mother, with her children at her knee’ seems designed to build up a safe context for the picture of same-sex affection, implicitly assuring the reader that such relationships will not inhibit a girl from fulfilling her destiny as wife and mother. And Craik was certainly aware that relationships between adult women could be less ‘innocent’ (‘For two women, past earliest girlhood, to be completely absorbed in one another, and make public demonstration of the fact, by caresses or quarrels, is so repugnant to common sense, that where it ceases to be silly it becomes actually wrong’).38 Olive may therefore represent the germ of Craik’s later article ‘In Her Teens’ (1864), a text in which Craik crystallizes her views of girlhood as an unusual phase in the female life-span, filled with ‘infinite hopes’, ‘boundless aspirations’, ‘dauntless energies’, and a ‘seemingly unlimited capacity for both joy and pain’. It is, she continues wistfully, a period of ‘crisis in which the whole ear and brain are full of tumult, when all life looks strange and bewildering—delirious with exquisite unrealities’.39 Article and novel alike seek to clear cultural room for these experiences, insisting that they are innate and maintaining that they must be more widely understood and accepted. Preoccupied with spiritual growth, didactic novels demonstrate an extremely sophisticated understanding of girls’ conflicted, tumultuous psyches; indeed, Christianity seems to have given writers a discourse with which to talk about subjective experience in general and psychological growth in particular. As we have seen, didactic writ36

Dinah Mulock Craik, Olive (London: W. Nicholson, 1850). Dalsimer argues that ‘intense, often erotically tinged relationships’ between young people of the same sex are common in the teenage years: ‘The friend is often idealized; for part of what the adolescent seeks is to replace what has been lost as the parents are diminished in his or her estimation’ (8). 38 Dinah Mulock Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1858), 174. 39 Dinah Mulock Craik, ‘In Her Teens’, Macmillan’s, 10 (1864), 219–23; 220. 37

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ers’ accounts of girls’ late-teenage rebellions may even resonate with turn-of-the-century feminist accounts of female development. Yet their potential claim to innovation is qualified, for while Christianity facilitates discussion of turmoil and confusion during girlhood, it posits a fixed model of adult psychology. The journey itself can be experimental and self-interested, but the end of the journey is predetermined as a state of altruism and selflessness. The tension between the journey and its ending is most evident in Elizabeth Sewell’s Ivors (1856). The text narrates the contrasting experiences of two heroines, 18-year-old Helen Clare and 19-year-old Susan Graham. Helen, who has been brought up according to her stepmother’s strange educational ‘systems’, ‘was a problem to herself and to others’ (Ivors, i. 100): suffering (like so many heroines) under a painfully inadequate maternal regime, she struggles to find a more persuasive and sympathetic role model. However, she turns not to a religious guide, but rather to a subversive women’s rights’ activist named Madame Reinhard. This unusual plot development forms part of an enormously taut and difficult maturation process, during which issues are raised that are never satisfactorily resolved. The heroine finally grows up in the space between two chapters, realizing the full error of her ways, the legitimacy of Christianity and the pre-eminent good of marriage away from the reader’s gaze: she thus seems to morph almost instantaneously (and quite implausibly) from a rebellious, complicated girl into a comfortable matron who enjoys nothing so much as fulfilling her parish duties. Ivors exemplifies the conflict at the heart of the Christian didactic novel—the tension between an experimental, fascinating, rebellious youth and a stable, compliant adulthood. Helen’s accounts of her rebellious and proto-feminist beliefs during her Sturm und Drang (‘“If I cannot have the happiness of which I once dreamed, yet I would have freedom,—room for my mind to expand—scope for my intellect”’ (Ivors, ii. 140)) provide plot structure, dynamism, and narrative interest. This is not merely a twenty-first-century reader’s interpretation: Sewell reported sadly that she ‘did not quite succeed’ with Ivors. ‘My own interest lay with Susan [the more ideal heroine],’ she remarked in her Autobiography, ‘but my readers did not, I think, as a rule, feel with me . . . the wayward, contradictory Helen was the favourite.’40 ‘Contradictory’ is right: rather as Ethel May 40 Eleanor L. Sewell (ed.), The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), 146. Susan is, for much of the novel, an extremely

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strives to reconcile her church-building plans and her love of Greek with ideals of domestic womanhood, so Helen struggles to resolve the tensions between her internal sense of what is true and what she knows is expected of her. Thus, for instance, when she is told of her lover’s political successes, she admits: ‘“I don’t understand myself. The fact is, Susan, I believe I am frightfully perverse. When I am told I am to be glad, I am not glad at all; I am frozen up into an icicle”’ (Ivors, i. 117–18). Indeed, Helen’s painful inability to feel love for her autocratic (but worthy) fiancé, Claude Egerton, is described with great sympathy. Like Gaskell’s Jemima Bradshaw, who ‘set her teeth tight together, and determined that he should either love her as she was, or not at all’, Helen is unwilling to ‘change her very nature’ for her lover: ‘“He is exacting; I feel I shall be kept in perpetual restraint, and I can’t be, I won’t be; he must learn it now, or, Susan, we shall be miserable . . .”’ (Ruth, 219; Ivors, i. 310). While Helen ultimately learns that submissiveness to one’s husband is best, different—and infinitely more contentious—approaches to marriage are reported in the text. Although Madame Reinhard does not have the author’s backing as a character, Sewell does express some equivocal support for her perspectives. On one occasion, indeed, the line between narrator and Reinhard becomes suggestively indistinct: Surely Madame Reinhard was right. There was no freedom in England for an unmarried woman in her parent’s house. Let her age and experience be what it might, those who had been accustomed to treat her as a child would still continue to do so, and the world would look upon her as such. Madame Reinhard was not so many years older, but she was free. She went where she liked, did as she liked, chose her own friends, her own society, read her own books, gave her intellect free scope. It was all the charm of that magic word, Madame. (Ivors, ii. 90)

It is tempting to read Sewell’s own experiences into this passage. As she recorded in her autobiography, her brothers consistently repressed and disparaged her literary interests, expecting the women of the household to defer to their own ambitions. Her eldest brother William dominated her literary career in the early stages, ‘editing’ her novels until 1853. ‘Let her age and experience be what it might, those who had been accustomed to treat her as a child would still composed and stable heroine: she is slightly older than Helen, and thus perhaps beyond the transitional phase.

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continue to do so’ suggests the frustration of a woman who, ‘experienced’ in matters outside the family, remains infantilized within it. There is space for this kind of questioning, this expression of suppressed anger, during the depiction of Helen’s ‘awkward age’. Indeed, even the ideal Susan Graham briefly tries to raise her voice against the restrictions placed on women: her wish that ‘“women could speak out sometimes”’ is a more summary expression of Madame Reinhard’s far-sighted prediction, ‘“women are not what they were; they are making a position for themselves; their voices are raised even now; they appeal for liberty, and it will be granted them”’ (Ivors, i. 230, ii. 28). Yet such notions are not acceptable in adult women, as the rare presence of an ideal mother—Mrs Graham— seems designed to convey. Susan’s mother offers the reader (and Helen) a pattern of what womanhood should—must—be. Sewell outlines the crucial difference between girlhood and womanhood explicitly in the final chapter of the novel: The young girl cares for herself, her own prospects, her own hopes and fears. Life is so new to her, so engrossing, that it is only by an effort that she can throw herself into the minds of others, so as to feel real sympathy. But a mother, or an aunt, or a friend, wearied with disappointment, and pressed down by care, has ceased to live for herself . . . Self, indeed, may and does lurk under the holiest affections, but, for the most part, God has ordained that by them we should be purified from the dross of the world, and so learn to live out of ourselves, to find our rest at last with Him. (Ivors, ii. 433)

This is Helen at the beginning and the end of the novel: initially thoughtless, selfish, and hedonistic; latterly ‘a useful, happy mother’ preoccupied with her husband’s well-being, her children’s safety, and her parish business (Ivors, ii. 434). However, selfless womanhood is not the stuff of narrative interest, as Sewell seems to recognize. She tries to insist that the self-forgetful experiences of the adult woman are in fact dramatic: ‘The careworn, faded, unexcitable, uninteresting occupants of middle age, those are the real actors in the great drama of life. As they play their parts well, so are the young safe, and the old happy . . .’ (Ivors, ii. 432). Yet, despite her insistence on the necessity of studying ‘the summer of life, rather than its spring’, Sewell’s novel itself centres on the self-interest, the energy, and the psychological complexity of girlhood, consigning adulthood to the last few, brief chapters (Ivors, ii. 432). Christianity offered a means of accessing and describing the importunate demands of the inner life during girlhood, and it offered a

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means of attaining single womanhood. However, it also insisted that the journey must lead to self-abnegation for ‘mother, aunt, or friend’ alike. Several years earlier, Charlotte Brontë used the religious narrative of a spiritual journey from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to map out Jane Eyre’s secular development. As we have seen, Brontë’s novel does not exactly present an awkward age, but it does depict a series of trials that develop the heroine’s character, generating a surprisingly self-assured and self-determining heroine. At the end of the narrative, however, Jane is described as her husband’s ‘right hand’, committed to his happiness and well-being. This ending, which has troubled many readers (and generated considerable feminist debate), may exemplify the problem of the didactic novel—the fact that while spiritual narratives facilitate a recognition of self-interest in girlhood, they are patterned ultimately to produce self-denying womanhood. Jane, isolated with Rochester in the dank world of Ferndean, seems a profoundly different creature from the fury who raged at Mrs Reed (‘“I cannot live so”’). ‘Purified from the dross of the world,’ she has ‘ceased to live for herself’; caring for her blinded husband, she seems in many ways an ideal Victorian wife. It is her choice, we learn, to serve—to replace her own voice with his, or perhaps with the stories he wished to hear her tell: ‘Never did I weary of reading to [my husband]; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to be done’ (Jane Eyre, 38, 475).41 41 Critics disagree about the degree of self-determination Jane displays and—a conceptually related question—the level of narrative control she exerts at the close of Jane Eyre. Rosemarie Bodenheimer argues that Rochester’s blindness ‘leaves Jane in sole command of the narrative field; she becomes the single source of evidence . . . the arbiter of what is and is not to be told’ (Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘Jane Eyre in Search Of Her Story’, Papers on Language and Literature, 16 (1980), 387–402; 393). My own reading presents Jane as a more disempowered figure, a conclusion that discomfits me since I, like Adrienne Rich and countless other readers, have found the text a crucial source of feminist ‘nourishment’. Carla Kaplan’s account of the novel offers a useful way of negotiating this potential disconnect. Kaplan also finds Jane in a compromised power relation to Rochester at the close of the story, ‘Rochester’s narattee’, a ‘listener’ who quietly withholds crucial parts of her story from her husband and thus denies us a final vision of ‘utopian conversational exchange’ in marriage. However, Kaplan reads this not as submission to Victorian ideals of marriage but rather as Brontë’s resistance to ‘the unproblematic articulation of easy or utopian solutions. [The novel] remains unsure about how hierarchical Victorian conventions of gender, class, sexuality and status might be overturned, ambivalent about the limits of both constructionism and essentialism, uneasy about the promises of romance and idealism, torn between identification and desire.’ Carla Kaplan, ‘Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women’s Narration’, Novel, 30 (1996), 5–31; 14, 16, 21, 27. Taking

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Yet if self-pleasuring womanhood remained an unimaginable goal, Christian didactic texts contributed—with Jane Eyre—to shift the rhetoric of maturation from a societal to a psychological discourse around the middle of the century. This was no small feat. Mothers tend to be ‘sacrificed’ because they are the means by which social stability is enforced; a young woman cannot freely evolve under the protective aegis of a mother unless she is openly, dangerously transgressive. However, the loss of maternal figures is often succeeded by the discovery of another female spiritual guiding figure; the ensuing process of connection generates a strong sense of female community in these texts, a wider and shared devotion to spiritual life and Christian values. Moreover, the narratives involve the reader in this process through frequent asides and exhortions, generating a further sense of community and attachment. So, for example, in The Experience of Life, the heroine narrates her youthful experiences from the vantage-point of middle age, thereby introducing a dialectic between adult woman and girl which reflects the relationship between educative text and receptive reader. In Olive, Craik both directly addresses the reader as a mother while also narrating her own ‘feminine’ responses during the writing-process: ‘our [tears] are gathering while we write—Ah! “We also have been in Arcadia”’ (Olive, 68). Thus if the texts dislodge the mother from the heroine’s experience, they do not write a seismic breech into the relationships between girls and women. They rather supplement family relationships with other female affiliations, between writer and reader, writer and heroine, heroine/reader and single woman. Arguably, this only multiplies the identity figures available both to the transitional heroine and to the reader herself. ‘Marriage is not the object of life,’ remarks the narrator of Ivors; ‘only one amongst many objects to its attainment. That may seem a truism; yet we are tempted continually to forget it’ (Ivors, ii. 432). These texts are not designed to undermine the gender status quo, but they do offer and recommend models of femininity other than wife a lead from Kaplan, I also read Jane Eyre as a text that explores desires that are not fulfilled and refuses to imagine easy ways of fulfilling them. Brontë’s use of a narrative structure that preordains Jane’s ultimately subordinate position is not a celebration of that position but rather signals Brontë’s lack of access to narrative structures with different conclusions. It suggests her cautious refusal to ‘tack on’ a radically new conclusion that would challenge not only contemporary gender hierarchies and the modern conception of the marriage relation, but also the myth of growth that shadowed and structured Christian accounts of human subjective development.

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and motherhood. Ethel May, Sally Mortimer, and Susan Graham all remain single and, while Olive finally marries, she has already achieved an artistic career.42 The rejection of marriage as a woman’s one ‘object of life’ has important implications for Victorian society’s sense of the transition to womanhood; for, as the narrator indicates in Ivors, without the ‘charm of that magic word, Madame,’ there ‘was no freedom for a woman in England in her parent’s house’. In other words, until marriage a woman remained effectively a child. Yet the 1851 Census had shown that women now outnumbered men—and, indeed, that a significant proportion of women were simply not marrying.43 This was, therefore, a decade in which society plausibly began to realize that for a large number of women, attaining adulthood through marriage was impossible. Thus the emphasis on female consciousness, the careful charting of subjective development, and the celebration of the single woman seem to respond to a broader need to shift the focus away from the marriage contract; to redefine adulthood as an independently achievable condition (even if that adulthood was, necessarily, selfless). The need for such a redefinition is perhaps most famously expressed by Yonge in the next decade. Rachel Curtis, 25 years old in the opening pages of The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), elicits the reader’s sympathy as she rages against a system which equates her with a 17 year old: ‘I am a young lady forsooth!—I must not be out late; I must not put forth my views; I must not choose my acquaintance; I must be a mere helpless, useless being, growing old in a ridiculous fiction of prolonged childhood, affecting those graces of so-called sweet seventeen that I never had—because, because why?’ (The Clever Woman of the Family, i. 4–5)44 42 Interestingly, Mrs Graham’s model of ideal motherhood does not lead Susan to reproduce her choices, since the girl ultimately chooses a single life (when the man of her choice marries Helen). Susan tries to use her mother as a means of validating and giving purpose to that life: ‘ “to love you, and comfort you, and be more to you than ten thousand Ruths could have been to Naomi; never, never, to leave you, my own sweet mother . . .”’ (Ivors, ii. 408). 43 In an article written in response to the findings of the Census, W. R. Greg noted that there were, on average, 6 per cent more women than men in society. However, Greg calculated that a considerable number of women must actually choose a single life: ‘1,100,000 women in the best and most attractive period of life [between 20 and 40] . . . must be classed as unnaturally, if not all unintentionally, single.’ Greg, ‘Why are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862), 434–60; 441. 44 Charlotte Yonge, The Clever Woman of the Family, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1865), hereafter referenced parenthetically as CWF.

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Rachel’s impassioned polemic joins a corpus of mid-century didactic writing that affirms the enervating consequences of society’s ‘fictions’ of girlhood—written so often by women who, like Yonge and Sewell, had themselves embraced the single life. Imagining a world without mothers, then, didactic novels do not deny the importance of all female inheritances. The transition to adulthood is figured as a period in which relationships with other women become crucial; women friends, women relatives, and women writers combine gently to criticize, yet support and sustain, the struggling, awkward young woman.

mothers recovered: retrieving ‘influence’ in romance fiction If Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre formed a type of thinking, selfdetermining young womanhood, Charles Dickens’s Dora, the notorious ‘child-wife’ of David Copperfield (1850), provided a model of arrested growth and permanent immaturity. While Jane progresses through various stages (Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End) on a journey that prepares her for marriage with Rochester, Dora’s self-designed epithet expresses the fact that she embarks on wifehood straight from childhood, without experiencing the salutary tests and trials of a developmental phase. Throughout Dora’s ill-fated marriage to David, Dickens stresses that the young wife is unable to make the transition between a sense of herself as an unconstrained child and the recognition of herself as a woman with adult responsibilities. Utterly unable to manage the servants or attend to the housekeeping, she makes tea for her husband and his friend ‘as if she were busying herself with a set of doll’s tea-things’ (David Copperfield, 525).45 Didactic writers of the 1850s were horrified by Dora’s example. Dinah Craik stressed that no girl should marry before she was ready to face a wife’s responsibilities, claiming that death might well be better than such a premature union: ‘But only picture these poor little silly Doras living, instead of, happily, dying!’ Matilda Pullan designed her entire text to address Dora’s inadequacies: Maternal Counsels provides access to the kind of information Dora so signally lacked. After all, she notes, ‘We may smile at 45 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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the ignorance of Dickens’s “Dora,” but how many young ladies marry with as little domestic knowledge . . .’46 Gaskell’s Ruth, of course, provided another example of the potentially disastrous consequences of motherlessness in the early 1850s. Like Dora, Gaskell’s heroine remains ignorant of ‘adult’ matters long after her first sexual experience. Just before she clambers, fatally, into the London-bound coach with Bellingham, Gaskell poignantly notes that Ruth has not yet acquired a mature understanding of the world: ‘for (like a child) all dilemmas appeared of equal magnitude to her’ (Ruth, 60). This childish innocence is retained after her fall and after Bellingham has deserted her: ‘She had no penitence, no consciousness of error or offence; no knowledge of any one circumstance but that he was gone’ (Ruth, 94). Gaskell clearly attributes the tragedy of Ruth’s downfall to the fact that she lacked mother and mother-substitute alike: the one potential candidate, Ruth’s employer Mrs Mason, entirely failed to ‘keep up the character of her girls by tender vigilance and maternal care’ (Ruth, 54). While Gaskell and Dickens, like Sewell and Yonge, use motherlessness to generate an unorthodox yet sympathetic individual (Ruth falls, while Dora fails to live up to the standard of the Agnes in the House), the plots centring these motherless heroines do not proceed to stress their concomitant psychological growth. Indeed, Dora and Ruth remain stuck in childhood precisely because they lack a guide to help them develop a sense of themselves as adult. This is not to say that development is a dead issue in the texts: Ruth is later able to develop a better understanding of the world and of herself through her relationship with the Bensons while Dora, an ignorant girl until the day she dies, wonders if greater contact with Agnes could have helped develop her character.47 Nevertheless, rather than facilitating an independent journey, rather than mapping out a new and enabling transition to womanhood, motherlessness in these novels inhibits the girl, in the first place, from entering the transitional stage at all. Jane Eyre’s ‘incendiary’ impact on the Victorian women’s novel has long been acknowledged, yet an almost equally substantial corpus of mid-century romantic fiction reshapes the narratives of ignor46

Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, 160; Pullan, Maternal Counsels, 7. ‘“Don’t you think, if I had had [Agnes] for a friend a long time ago, Doady,” said Dora, her bright eyes shining very brightly, and her little right hand idly busying itself with one of the buttons of my coat, “I might have been more clever perhaps?” ’ (David Copperfield, 499). 47

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ant, innocent Ruth Hilton and Dora Spenlow. Verbal and rhetorical echoes of Gaskell’s and Dickens’s novels surface regularly in women’s romances: such fictions deal also with similar themes, most notably girls’ need for knowledge and the (related) possibility of their sexual downfall. (Dora herself is entirely chaste of course, although Dickens’s novel deals with the dangers of sexual misconduct through the haunting figures of Martha and Little Em’ly.) Romance novels of the period also tend to proceed (at least initially) along similar lines: motherless heroines are preserved in a state of prolonged early girlhood at the beginning of the books, unconscious of their budding sexuality, unaware of the conventional duties of womanhood, and, as Gaskell put it, ‘unsuspicious and innocent of any harmful consequences’ to their actions (Ruth, 61). Yet there are two major differences: first, popular romances initially display a tendency to idealize this state of dreamy, happy unconsciousness; and second, the novels force their heroines into a rude awakening, quickly compelling girls into an awareness of adult life. Like didactic non-fictions, romance novels provide access to information about adult responsibilities. However, this is achieved in romantic novels through a curious plot device: heroines typically discover the truth about their absent mother’s unsavoury past. This plot device reinscribes the mother in the daughter’s transition to womanhood; romance heroines are ultimately better equipped for adulthood because they have been tangentially prepared, by their mothers, for the dangers of menfolk. Moreover, the plot creates a transitional, interim stage by fracturing the girl’s peaceful, child-like innocence and introducing a phase of confusion and disorder, which is characterized by the search for knowledge. Dora the ‘child-wife’ is echoed in numerous 1850s romances; in, for example, the ‘girl-wife’ Margaret in Holme Lee’s Sylvan Holt’s Daughter (1858: iii. 93); the ‘woman-child’ Lotty in Julia Stretton’s Margaret and her Bridesmaids (1856: i. 223); Amabel, the ‘half child, half woman’ of Mary Elizabeth Wormeley’s Amabel; or, The Victory of Love (1853: ii. 62); and Marguerite, a figure ‘of almost infantine sweetness’ in Annie Edwardes’s The Morals of Mayfair (1858: i. 8).48 Allusions to Ruth’s story also surface constantly in a 48 ‘Holme Lee’ (Harriet Parr), Sylvan Holt’s Daughter, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1858), hereafter referenced parenthetically as SHD; Julia Stretton, Margaret and her Bridesmaids, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1856); Mary Elizabeth Wormeley, Amabel; or, The Victory of Love, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1853),

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decade deeply concerned with the plight of the fallen woman. Holme Lee’s Maud Talbot (1854) narrates the story of the motherless Jessie, a milliner, and sympathetically traces the causes of her gradual decline into prostitution. The dangers of motherlessness and poor education are also explored in Wormeley’s Amabel, which adopts Gaskell’s plaint: ‘“Who is there, for instance, who, when passing judgment upon the faults or weaknesses of a young and inexperienced woman . . . will . . . plead for this young girl before the many that accuse her, that she never knew the counsels of a mother?”’ (Amabel, i. 10–11). Indeed, each of the three heroines to be discussed here (Wormeley’s Amabel, Margaret from Lee’s Sylvan Holt’s Daughter, and Edwardes’s Marguerite from The Morals of Mayfair) is motherless; in the early stages of the novels, this condition is represented as having prevented the heroines from recognizing their own advancing maturation. While Gaskell consistently mourns this state of affairs in Ruth (remember that Ruth was ‘too young when her mother died to have received any cautions or words of advice respecting the subject of a woman’s life’), popular romance writers are more equivocal. This is exemplified in Amabel, the story of a mistreated, misunderstood young woman and her disastrous marriage. Orphaned young, ‘Bella’ is raised by relatives in Malta who have taken little responsibility for the girl’s development. And although, in the early stages of the novel, the heroine’s motherless state was a cause for lament, a few pages later the narrator notes that such a condition leads to an attractive unconsciousness of conventional feminine behaviour. Amabel, therefore, continued to grow up in Malta a very different person from the proper models of lady-like deportment which every careful mother sets before her child . . . Bella’s moral training came from the circumstances of her position. Hers was no artificial nursery and schoolroom existence, requiring artificial checks, excitements, and emulations . . . (Amabel, i. 23–4)

Marguerite St John, heroine of The Morals of Mayfair, and Margaret Holt, protagonist of Sylvan Holt’s Daughter, similarly have little sense of conventional womanly activities. Marguerite spends her hereafter referenced parenthetically as Amabel; Annie Edwardes, The Morals of Mayfair, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1858), hereafter referenced parenthetically as MM. Wormeley (married name Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer) is sometimes considered an American writer (her mother and husband were American); however, she was born in London and spent many of her formative years in Britain and France.

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days roaming the countryside of West Brittany; Margaret has been ‘growing up as wild, and almost as ignorant, as a colt in the heather’ at home in ‘Wildwood’ (SHD i. 5). Indeed, the author is at pains to stress that, like Amabel, Margaret has experienced a pre-eminently ‘natural’ youth and not ‘the artificial nursery and schoolroom existence’ that a mother would have imposed: her father has actively prevented her from ‘learning any kind of woman’s work’. She knows nothing about her mother and has even been discouraged from forming relationships with the female servants. She is, we are told, ‘a very innocent, guileless, happy creature’ (SHD i. 9). The novels seem desperate, in the first instance, to maintain girls in a state of Edenic, pre-lapsarian sexlessness. Motherlessness is an essential prerequisite for such a condition, since fathers (apparently) are unaware of their daughters’ dawning sexuality. We can see Gaskell’s appropriation of this idea in Wives and Daughters (1866) some years later, incidentally: Mr Gibson only realizes that his daughter is maturing after the ‘excitable’ Mr Coxe asks to marry her. Having previously assured himself that ‘she’s quite a baby’, Mr Gibson is ‘startled at discovering that his little one was growing fast into a woman, and already the passive object of some of the strong interests that affect a woman’s life’ (Wives and Daughters, 87).49 Marguerite St John, heroine of The Morals of Mayfair, is also ‘a passive object’, ‘innocent beyond what we in our ordinary life ever meet with’ because, like Mr Gibson, her father is blind to the increasing physical maturity displayed by the 16-year-old girl (MM ii. 68). A mother would attire her daughter in the clothes of early adulthood (and would, as Wormeley put it, set ‘the proper models of ladylike deportment’ before her). Mr St John, however, dresses and treats his daughter as a child: there was already promise of the richest lines of contour in the graceful shoulders, and full and exquisitely-proportioned bust. As it had never 49 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866; London: Penguin, 1969). Ruth Yeazell also emphasizes Molly’s ‘unconsciousness’ in her girlhood, arguing that ‘the longest and most leisurely of Gaskell’s novels has nearly run its course before the heroine’s consciousness has quite awakened . . .’ Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 194. However, it is worth noting that when Gaskell give us access to Margaret’s consciousness in North and South, in very similar circumstances, we learn that the heroine is aware of her own development but is keen to prevent her father from discovering the fact: ‘Margaret felt guilty and ashamed of having grown so much into a woman as to be thought of in marriage . . .’ (Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 32–3).

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entered into her head, or that of her father, that she was approaching the age of womanhood, she was still dressed like a mere child, in a little muslin frock, without any ornament . . . and so short in the skirts as to allow a full view of her tiny feet . . . (MM i. 9)

Lingering somewhat voyeuristically over the evidence of Marguerite’s physical development, this passage celebrates the heroine’s physical growth while insisting on her ignorance of her own maturation. The description also raises a feeling of apprehension on the reader’s part about Marguerite’s Dora-like character—about the disparity between her physical and emotional development. Indeed, this disparity is about to cause Marguerite serious trouble. For the serpent is about to enter Eden: a serpent in the form of one Philip Earnscliff, a gentleman who can’t bring himself to mention his wife back home. Romance texts always, indeed, make us conscious of impending danger. Amabel, like Marguerite, adores her surrounding landscape and enjoys nothing so much as rambling along the beach listening to ‘the deep-sounding melody of the mysterious ocean’ (Amabel, i. 75), yet the evocation of the ocean as deep and mysterious signals danger. While the seashore forms a border space, a place for dreaming and exploring, the sea itself proves treacherous: it brings Amabel a young lover, but it also carries him away to his death, leading her to embark upon a tragic, loveless marriage and a journey away from her beloved Malta. The heroine’s departure from Eden is even more explicitly prophesied in Edwardes’s The Morals of Mayfair—suitably enough, by Philip Earnscliff himself: ‘But you, Marguerite, will not be a child forever. Some day you must learn to be a grown-up woman, and obey someone not your father, and give up wandering . . . and sitting by the water-lilies.’ Marguerite opened her eyes wide at this programme of futurity. ‘And why must I do all this?’ she asked. (MM, ii. 47–8)

While the river bank itself is, like the seashore, a safe location, the water-lilies symbolize not only Marguerite’s preference for quiet and stillness but also her relative fragility. Flowers and Their Associations (1840) notes that water-lilies, which ‘delight in still waters’ and which are ‘particularly partial to the shadow of trees’, are as ‘ephemeral as [they are] beautiful’.50 Water-lily imagery therefore 50 Anne Pratt, Flowers and Their Associations (London: Charles Knight, 1840), 360. Lilies also suggest the Virgin, of course. Gaskell uses the unsettling dual association (of virtue and ephemerality) in the water-lily to powerful effect in Ruth. Mr

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heightens the atmosphere of impending doom, of loss and closure, in Edwardes’s novel. It also validates the heroine’s desire to stay put— or, to use Longfellow’s much quoted words, to remain ‘Standing, with reluctant feet, | Where the brook and river meet, | Womanhood and childhood fleet!’ These scenes reveal that heroines (and, one suspects, their creators) would rather evade adulthood and remain in early youth. Fear of the ‘programme of futurity’ seems to express concern about the idea of growing up: if this expresses fear on one level of adult sexuality and of adult sexual mores (a theme that will be developed in more detail presently), it also seems to articulate authors’ anxieties about an industrial future and nostalgia for an agrarian past. Thus, for example, Mrs Gore commented in Progress and Prejudice (1854) that the old peaceful ‘country circle’, once a standard community structure, is ‘now rare to be found in wealthy, fussy, railroad-driven England’ (Progress and Prejudice, i. 16).51 She firmly connects industrial advance with moral decline, remarking: ‘We are grown more locomotive, more enlightened, more grand, and more selfish’ (Progress and Prejudice, i. 17). The extensive use of pastoral imagery in these novels echoes Gore’s wistful recollection of a pre-industrial past, and heroines’ desires to avoid the future consequently indicate their oldstyle, traditional character. They are exceptional if anachronistic beings; ideal expressions of a sylvan past, fortuitously revived in the present day. Yet knowledge and womanhood inexorably assert their presence, as possibilities if not yet as fact. Wormeley’s Amabel stresses, indeed, that developing knowledge of ‘the realities of life’ is a defining feature of the transition from childhood to adulthood: There are distinct stages of mind which mark the progress of our years, developed in different degrees according to circumstances or character, in every specimen of human nature. The child’s first impulse is to personify all objects; and in this state of mind ideal things have, to him, a reality. Next comes the stage of youth, when real things are idealized; and the restless melancholy common to those just entering life, has its origin in an Bellingham picks the flowers just after Ruth’s fall: ‘he took off her bonnet, without speaking, and began to place his flowers in her hair. She was quite still while he arranged her coronet, looking up in his face with loving eyes, with a peaceful composure’ (Ruth, 74). Ruth is a type of the Virgin here, complete with a ‘coronet’ and a tranquil, submissive demeanour, yet she has just lost her virginity. 51 Catherine Grace Frances Gore, Progress and Prejudice, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1854).

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unacknowledged, instinctive conviction, that the first encounter with the realities of life will break in upon this state of feeling, and that the heart cannot repose itself in dreams. (Amabel, i. 38–9)52

Wormeley’s account of the ways in which ‘the first encounter with the realities of life’ infringes upon the ‘dreams’ of childhood maps the plots of innumerable mid-century romance novels, so many of which centre the traumas a girl experiences as she starts to grow up. Wormeley’s intriguing account suggests, then, that the oft-repeated plot device was itself a way of figuring the transition to womanhood—that the pattern was formulated to reflect (what authors understood to be) the psychodrama of growing up in mid-century Britain. The dream most consistently fractured during youth is the dream of an ideal mother. ‘“I had always thought of my mother with such a sacred love,”’ says a disillusioned Margaret Holt towards the end of the first volume of Sylvan Holt’s Daughter: ‘“once I saw her picture. Oh yes, it was beautiful! . . . but I would have trampled it under my feet if I had known what I know now!”’ (SHD i. 315–16; 316). Margaret’s discovery of her mother’s portrait in fact occupies an important place in the novel’s first volume: indeed, the narrative of her feelings for Mrs Holt is given almost as much prominence as the narrative of her relationship with Colonel Fielding, the man she presently marries. The portrait, unearthed by a servant during her father’s absence, represented Margaret’s mother when she was young: The dress was simple yet picturesque; it consisted of a scarlet boddice [sic] cut low on the full bosom, and a skirt of rich white satin falling in long, broad, rippled folds to the feet; the arms were bare almost to the shoulder, but a scarf of black lace trailed over one, as if worn to enhance its splendid voluptuous form and colouring. There was an air of conscious grace and loveliness in the attitude which was a little daring, perhaps also a little defiant, but the picture altogether was that of an eminently beautiful and fascinating woman. (SHD i. 110)

52 Wormeley’s observations remind us that psychological accounts of growth are hardly the preserve of the twentieth century. Her terms resonate with Peter Blos’s description of the individuation process: ‘[adolescents] pass through stages of selfconsciousness and fragmented existence . . . Adolescent individuation is accompanied by feelings of isolation, loneliness, and confusion . . . Consequently, many an adolescent tries to remain indefinitely in a transitional phase of development’ (Peter Blos, The Adolescent Passage (New York: International Humanities Press, 1979), 12).

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The image of Mrs Holt troubles Margaret and her companions— Jacky, a servant, and Martin Carew, who is in love with the young girl—enormously; the young Mrs Holt clearly clothed and positioned herself to accentuate and enhance her physical charms. Martin is particularly concerned by the similarities between the sensual, flaunting woman and his youthful beloved: ‘He remarked that it was a fine painting, but did not appear to admire it altogether; then he compared it feature by feature with Margaret, and was compelled to acknowledge many traits of resemblance’ (SHD i. 111). The painting seems to possess a life of its own, inexorably relating the young girl to itself: ‘Margaret’s brow was larger, but the beautiful eyes were the same . . . the likeness it bore to (Margaret) . . . grew as it was looked at’ (SHD i. 111). Martin’s discomfort is easily explained: the transgressive painting, sexual and performative years after its execution, suggests Margaret’s own potential for similarly sensual, selfconscious, and self-constructing conduct. The fear of Mrs Holt as a negative role model and precedent only increases when the full narrative of her transgression is finally told. Margaret’s mother (like Trollope’s Glencora Palliser) was persuaded by relatives to give up the man she loved and marry Sylvan Holt. Of course the marriage was disastrous, and Mrs Holt later left her husband and child for her first love. Mrs Clervaux, a neighbour and confidante, frames the story as one Margaret must be taught not to repeat: ‘“She was very sinful and guilty. Yes . . . she was very guilty. I dare not excuse her to spare you, lest I should seem to put wrong for right, and she was without excuse”’ (SHD i. 310). Initially we seem intended to accept Mrs Clervaux’s statement: certainly, Margaret is revolted by the story, expressing strong disgust at her mother’s uncontained sexual desires: ‘Before her wrathful imagination, suddenly matured and quickened, there arose a picture of that beautiful voluptuous woman who had first sacrificed an honest love for legal prostitution, and, too late, sickening of her hollow life, had fled from its cold decorum into an abyss of irremediable guilt’ (SHD i. 319). Given that the novel elsewhere romanticizes sexlessness and virgin purity, the narrative of Margaret’s mother seems designed to stress the pre-eminent importance of rejecting sensual desires. Yet, curiously, the novel recognizes that Margaret’s prolonged childishness, her still-untested character, makes her a deficient reader of her mother’s history. Indeed, the narrator proceeds to refute her scandalized response: ‘None are such stern judges as the

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young and pure; they have not stood in the furnace-blast of strong temptation . . . Margaret was very harsh and cruel while she thought herself merely just’ (SHD i. 319–20). Ruth-like, the novel turns into a plea for understanding and sympathy for the fallen woman. The narrator criticizes Margaret for recognizing sin but not penitence: ‘Her father’s sufferings and wrongs, the dark shadow overcasting her own life, were vivid as letters of fire . . . [but] the long tear-washed repentance of her whose sins had caused all was unrealized to her mind.’ The reference to ‘letters of fire’ may also bring Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) to the reader’s mind, another narrative which, earlier in the decade, invoked sympathy and understanding for sexually transgressive women.53 Lee’s censure of judgemental responses to female sexual sin seems infused with the spirit of Hawthorne as well as Gaskell, although her characterization of selfrighteous disgust as childish ignorance is original and distinctive. The rest of Lee’s novel works hard to make sure the reader really gets the point. Volume II is essentially a reworking of volume I: Margaret must come to terms with the image of another woman from the past, in this case, her husband’s first love. Frances and Mrs Holt become blended in Margaret’s psyche as comparable, sexually threatening figures: Margaret . . . had her skeleton closet . . . and in this closet there hung a veiled picture of a beautiful woman—the woman who had been the love of her husband’s youth. She never passed the door of this closet without a thrill of disquietude, without a vague consciousness that there was life and motion in the figure, and that it might some day step from its frame and pass before her calm, superior, triumphant. (SHD iii. 77)

After discovering her mother’s past, Margaret seems mentally to picture all intimidating women as portraits: clearly she hopes to frame, to contain, these images of troubling sexuality, but they constantly threaten to break out of their confinement. The narrative supports the association of the two menacing women: Frances’s story mirrors that of Margaret’s mother, since she too gave up the man she loved and allowed herself to be persuaded into a loveless marriage. Yet the device of the repeated tale allows the text to continue its examination of Mrs Holt’s motives and subsequent travails—to redouble its efforts to embrace the fallen sister. For, once again, Margaret misjudges, and once again, the narrator reminds the reader that no one 53 For a non-fictional defence of the fallen woman see W. R. Greg, ‘Prostitution’, Westminster Review, 53 (1850), 448–506; 474.

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should claim to understand or judge the suffering experienced by a woman who is manipulated and deceived by those closest to her. After Frances has told Margaret the bare outline of her story, the narrator remarks: ‘Margaret thought she could fill up that outline very distinctly—a grand mistake! What innocent youthful imagination could fill up the sum of torture endured by a keenly sensitive woman stretched on the rack of an uncongenial marriage, and bound . . . [to one] for whom her highest sentiment was a shrinking pity?’ (SHD i. 181). Telling the story not once but twice, Lee insistently asks the reader to reappraise her conceptions of female sexual transgression. The structure of repetition also stresses that this is an ongoing cycle of error and mistreatment. Such narrative repetitions are not merely internal to this particular text: the plot of the ill-starred mother is constantly duplicated in mid-century romances. All three of the novels discussed here develop it in one form or another. Marguerite St John’s mother was, like Mrs Holt, persuaded into marriage with a man she did not love; her history, told by an old servant to Philip Earnscliff, prefigures Marguerite’s own tragic life. Like her mother, Marguerite loves one man, namely Philip himself. When she is left orphaned in her late teens, however, she is forced to marry a much older friend of her father’s for support, despite her unaltered affection for Philip: he obviously cannot marry her because, as he puts it, of the ‘hateful chain under which I must writhe’ (MM ii. 254). Marguerite, who is never directly told her mother’s story, subsequently repeats it herself, living a miserable married life and ultimately dying of heart disease, a congenital condition inherited from her mother. Yet while Marguerite’s story seems designed to emphasize the pointlessness (and the pathos) of this ongoing, repetitive, intergenerational saga, the narrative of Amabel’s life breaks the sequence. It is framed as a tale of the narrator’s own grandmother, inspired in the first place by the narrator’s discovery of Amabel’s portrait and, in the second place, by the narrator’s forthcoming marriage. Like the narrative of Mrs Holt, therefore, it functions partly as a cautionary tale. Once again, it describes how a girl was persuaded into marriage with a man she cared for only slightly: Amabel’s heart was given, as a girl, to a sailor named Felix, who died soon afterwards. The narrator’s father prefaces the story of Amabel’s life, nevertheless, by describing her as a paragon: ‘You will fulfil your dear mother’s last wishes, and my hopes, if you are just like her’ (Amabel, i., p. xxi). This remark seems somewhat baffling on the face of it, given Amabel’s unhappy

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and maligned life: she was widely treated as a fallen woman after her separation from her husband, Captain Warner, who came to mistrust her and her affection. However, Amabel’s abilities to love and to survive are constantly affirmed, leading us to suspect that the narrator’s father hopes to see his daughter emulate Amabel’s emotional strength and personal resilience. If Amabel begins the novel as Dora Spenlow, she ends it as Jane Eyre. Like Dora, Amabel’s early experience of marriage is disastrous because of her complete ignorance of domestic management. Unlike Dora, however, this condition of ignorance is not fatal since (like Ruth) she is befriended by a kindly clergyman after becoming separated from her husband. The clergyman smoothes her path to a job, to practical knowledge of domestic matters (leading to the memorable line ‘“I know now the full value of a sausage”’), and, gradually, to an increased self-assurance. She finally concludes that her decision to leave her mistrustful husband was correct: ‘“I do not desire to be acknowledged without affection. I can make my way alone through life: I have proved that I can . . . For I have conquered. Henceforth I cast the Past behind my back, and will work out my own Future”’ (Amabel, iii. 180–1). This is an interesting model to recommend to a girl about to be married (the narrator)—hardly what an orthodox Victorian father would want for his daughter. However, it is conceptually and thematically in accord with a genre which on the one hand stresses that error, pain, and misdemeanour are passed on interminably from mother to daughter and, on the other, appears to make some effort to break that cycle; to ‘work out [its] own Future’. Amabel is reunited with her husband at the end of the novel, but she now realizes that marriage must be predicated on self-dependence and knowledge.54 Knowledge is, indeed, absolutely key. For if the novels initially demonstrate a curious longing for the state of infantine ignorance, for Dora’s and Ruth’s complete unconsciousness of sexual vice or, for that matter, of the most common and everyday duties of a woman’s domestic life (itself an interesting correlation), they progressively demonstrate that such ignorance is unfeasible, if not actu54 Wormeley faces Brontë’s problem (in Jane Eyre) at the end of the novel—namely, how to represent an unusually self-dependent heroine as married. Wormeley sidesteps the issue by representing the reunion between Amabel and her husband in a letter and by confining details of their married life to ‘reports’ by other people. Thus the author fails ultimately to deal with the thorny logistical problem of integrating a selfsufficient heroine into a Victorian union.

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ally dangerous. Girls, they stress, must be equipped with information to face the exigencies of life, whether it is knowledge of household management or knowledge of sexual misconduct. Margaret Holt is accorded both: while the narrative of her mother’s history introduces her to ‘the realities of life’ and forces her to revise her childish notions of wrong, she is eventually given a governess to fit her for the more conventional grooves of a woman’s existence. Although the early stages of the novel celebrate her unusual upbringing, the novel gradually foregrounds Margaret’s recognition of her own inadequacies: ‘“Oh! father, I wish I had been educated as other women are! I am not fit for any place but Wildwood!”’ (SHD i. 284–5). These novels centre on motherless heroines, but—like midcentury didactic novels—they do not precisely reject mothers or maternal inheritances. Instead, they forge narratives that allow the mother to guide and aid her daughter’s transition to womanhood without imposing herself as the ideal model of adulthood, as the girl’s inexorable identity figure. Wormeley’s characterization of the mother/daughter relationship is suggestive: the phase in which ‘childhood is imperceptibly merged in womanhood’ is one, she says, in which ‘a tender and judicious mother, relying on the effects already wrought by the loving discipline of early days, will exert her influence rather than authority’ (Amabel, i. 54). The need articulated here, for a mother’s ‘influence’ rather than ‘authority’ during the transition to womanhood, seems resonant. Mid-century romance novels respond to the Dora/Ruth paradigm not by rearticulating the old cycle, imposing the burden of a commanding maternal force, but rather by constructing a narrative that nevertheless influences the young girl, shaping her value system and conferring knowledge of adult matters upon her. The narratives may also work, as we have seen, to break the cycle of internalized values: the heroine (and certainly the reader) are warned about the ongoing, repetitive nature of female disempowerment. Reconstructing the literary relationship between mother and daughter, rewriting it as a complicated yet ultimately beneficial relationship of influence rather than restraint, text and mother alike encourage the girl to achieve a more independent, knowledgeable, informed womanhood. The 1850s women’s novels discussed here continue to elevate female submission and male supremacy and to endorse the concept of separate spheres, but their reconception of the relationship between mother and daughter pushes at the very system by which traditional ideals of femininity were perpetuated.

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Growth is sometimes figured in unexpected ways in women’s fictions. Development may not be charted in the familiar form of the Bildungsroman; this does not mean that writers ignored or were unconscious of human development.55 Didactic novels explore the diffuse experiences of spiritual growth; romantic novels adopt what one might call a ‘garden of Eden narrative’. At the beginning of such novels a motherless, ‘natural’ girl is preserved in a pastoral landscape in a state of virgin sexlessness and pre-consciousness. The plot turns on an encounter with ‘the realities of life’: in the face of this the girl must leave the Arcadian landscape of childhood and confront adulthood, typically figured as the world of society.56 This pattern seems to reflect a common lived experience for many middle-class girls of the era, namely ‘coming out’, in which home life is exchanged for the complex, demanding, morally challenging world of society. By drawing on the founding biblical myth of knowledge-acquisition and entrance into the world, texts endow ‘coming out’ with a certain mythic status while presenting female growth as a narrative of pain and loss. For, as in the original garden of Eden narrative, the acquisition of knowledge and worldly experience is not an event to be celebrated but rather a source of profound sorrow. Yet while the novels invariably seem to regret the loss of childhood innocence (and childhood is represented not simply as a phase that society romanticizes but also as a time in which the girl can, all too briefly, romanticize the world), they do offer a positive conception of growth: the pain of discovering ‘the realities of life’ will be ameliorated, they suggest, by the development of a finely nuanced value system. Such a system will enable the subject to reconceive the world and many of its most painful discoveries—particularly, indeed, narratives of women’s transgressions. For maturity is ultimately defined as a new, more sympathetic, and morally expansive understanding of women’s histories. Explicitly supporting cultural celebrations of selfless mothering, these texts simultaneously insist on generating a sympathetic response for those whose lives have not followed the orthodox course. The transition to womanhood—in didactic and romantic texts alike—is thus conceived as the transition to an understanding of womanhood, rather than simply a transition to the duties and responsibilities society confers on a wife. 55 56

The form of the Bildungsroman will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2. ‘Ah! “We also have been in Arcadia” ’ (Olive, 68).

2

‘At the very turn of life’ in 1860s Fiction introduction She must be just out of the schoolroom, at the very turn of life, and I will try to get her into my training and show her a little of the real beauty and usefulness of the career she has before her. (CWF i. 160)

The Clever Woman of the Family is Charlotte Yonge’s most obviously antifeminist novel: initially single, strident, and self-confident, Rachel Curtis gradually realizes that self-sacrifice and wifely submission are a woman’s highest duties. Given the moral framework of the text, therefore, Rachel’s speech on training is clearly intended ironically. The author believes that there is indeed ‘“real beauty and usefulness”’ in a woman’s career, but only if she models herself on one of the faithful, self-abnegating women elevated in the narrative— Lady Temple and, above all, Ermine Williams. Yet while the message of Yonge’s text is clearly conservative, critics have noticed that the novels’ pattern characters are far from passive.1 Ermine is an author: she writes on a variety of issues for The Traveller’s Review and is conversant with important debates of the day. Alick’s conclusion at the end of the novel that their friend’s intellect is an exemplary ‘“engine for independence and usefulness”’ (CWF ii. 319) suggests that Yonge’s ideal of female behaviour is not so far removed from Rachel’s early statement of intent: ‘“I am five and twenty, and I will no longer be withheld from some path of usefulness! I will judge for myself, and when my mission has declared itself, I will not be withheld from it by any scruple that does not approve itself to my reason 1 See, for example, Patricia Thomson, The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal 1837–1873 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 81–2, and Sheila Foster, Victorian Women’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 23–5.

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and conscience”’ (CWF i. 5). The novel does support limited female independence and self-determination, and criticizes modern education systems for failing to instil such qualities in young girls. Bessie, whose education Rachel was so anxious to undertake, is unable to manage her affairs or make informed moral decisions. Her tragic incompetence is presented as a topical modern problem: ‘“if she had faults, they were those of her day and her training”’ (CWF ii. 259–60). The Clever Woman of the Family is very much a novel of its time: the education of women and girls became an increasingly significant issue in the 1860s. The Schools Inquiry Commission, set up in 1864, produced its Report on the education of girls and boys in 1867–8. The Report noted the prevailing middle-class custom of educating daughters at home, and although it basically supported this practice (as most likely to produce good future wives and mothers), it was nevertheless ‘extremely critical of the shoddy intellectual content, the academic incompetences of prevailing systems of girls’ education’, Carol Dyhouse notes. Commentators as conservative as Sarah Stickney Ellis subsequently spoke out against the poor education experienced by many young middle-class girls: describing the case of ‘a slightly educated young lady rising into womanhood’, Ellis argues, ‘it is quite possible that such a girl cannot spell, nor read a page of good English’. Deborah Gorham claims that the concerns raised by the Schools Inquiry Commission led to major advancements in female education, including finally the admittance of women to Cambridge. She suggests, therefore, that the 1860s marked ‘the turning point in the history of middle-class girls’ education in England’.2 In A Woman’s Thoughts on the Education of Girls (1866), Mrs Roe posed the question that lay at the heart of debates over girls’ education: ‘What, then, it may be asked, is woman’s mission?’3 The question of how to educate girls inexorably raised the issue of what they were being educated for.4 ‘Women’s mission’ became a matter 2 Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981), 44; Sarah Stickney Ellis, Education of the Heart: Women’s Best Work (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1869), 8, 9; Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 24–5; 25. 3 ‘Mrs Roe’, A Woman’s Thoughts on the Education of Girls (London: F. Pitman, 1866), 39. 4 Obviously, these questions were only really relevant to women with choices— that is to say, women from the higher echelons of society. On the varying duties and

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for debate, a subject open to question, throughout the 1860s. Anthony Trollope’s Alice Vavasour famously pondered: ‘What should a woman do with her life?’ in 1865.5 Two years earlier, Frances Power Cobbe claimed that the question was on the lips of multitudes: ‘hundreds and even thousands of women of the upper classes are saying, “what shall I do with my life?”’6 And lest we should think that Cobbe (a radical and proto-feminist commentator) was exaggerating the magnitude of this development, it is worth noting that Sarah Tytler, a conservative writer of advice papers for girls, also regarded such questioning as a major contemporary phenomenon. In Papers for Thoughtful Girls, Tytler emphasizes that girls in the transition to womanhood, girls pondering what kind of women they will become, are particularly subject to this uncertainty: ‘“I do not know what I shall do with myself after I leave school,” says many a good girl, doubtfully and regretfully. She need not be ashamed of the difficulty; her position is a problem of the present day.’7 Norman Keill remarks in The Universal Experience of Adolescence: ‘For the adolescent, the question, “What shall I be?” actually means, “With whom shall I identify?” Central to his problem of vocational choice is the problem of identification.’8 Keill’s theory— that an identity figure will support and shape the adolescent’s transition to adulthood—was, as we have already seen, key to the Victorians’ construction of the transition to womanhood also. In Girlhood (1869), Marianne Farningham entreated her readers to ‘take time to consider what is the mission of girlhood’. She defined it as ‘a mission of preparation’: You have made up your minds, probably, as to the kinds of women you wish to be. There is, doubtless, some example you wish to follow. Happy are the experiences of women in families according to class, period, and location see Shani D’Cruze, ‘Women and the Family’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995), 51–84. Carol Dyhouse discusses working girls in ch. 3 of Girls Growing Up: although she focuses on a slightly later period, her study usefully discusses the tensions between working-class experience and middleclass ideology. 5 Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1865; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 110. 6 Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Social Science Congresses, and Women’s Part in Them’, Essays on the Pursuits of Women (London: Emily Faithfull, 1863), 1–37; 26. 7 ‘Sarah Tytler’ (Henrietta Keddie), Papers for Thoughtful Girls (Edinburgh: Daldy, Isbister, 1862), 6. 8 Norman Keill, The Universal Experience of Adolescence (New York: International Universities, 1964), 657.

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girls who can say, ‘I would rather be like my mother than anyone I know.’ But, whoever it is, you cannot begin too soon to imitate a good model.9

Farningham, like the writers of 1850s advice texts, encouraged girls to learn to become ideal women by identifying themselves with their mothers. Yet Farningham—drawing on a tradition of concern about the stability of the mother/daughter identification cycle—was also conscious that the mother may not be the girl’s model of behaviour. Writers like Farningham thus openly acknowledged that girls might model themselves on non-maternal identity figures and subsequently make new ‘vocational choices.’ Of course, questions about what a girl might become gained both ammunition and cultural bearing as society considered changes in the broader condition and role of adult women. During the debates over the great Reform Bill of 1867, John Stuart Mill introduced an amendment that would have granted the franchise to women on equal terms with men. Discussions about Mill’s amendment inevitably focused on the relations between the sexes in general and the marriage relation in particular (presently founded on the notion that a couple had one mind, and that mind, his). Mill’s speech forced a parliamentary reappraisal of the gender status quo, although the amendment itself was eventually defeated. During the rest of the decade, work gained pace on the reform of laws concerning married women’s property: agitators were concerned to grant women the ability to deal with and dispose of their property independently, even after marriage. This was not fully achieved until 1882, although the first Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1870.10 Presumably because of fears about the influence of these debates on the next generation, conservative commentators were keen to im9 ‘Marianne Farningham’ (Mary Anne Hearne), Girlhood (London: James Clarke, 1869), 15–16. 10 For discussion on these developments see Lee Holcombe, ‘Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law, 1857–1882’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere (1977; London: Methuen, 1980), 3–28, and Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). The first Married Women’s Property Act did not recognize a woman’s independent legal status on marriage (Holcombe, ‘Victorian Wives’, 20–1, Shanley, Feminism, 67–8); married women were only granted the ‘legal capacity to act as autonomous economic agents’ in 1882 (Shanley, Feminism, 103; see also Holcombe, ‘Victorian Wives’, 24–5). For an extremely cogent contemporary assessment and refutation of the arguments in favour of denying married women a separate legal existence, see Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors’, Fraser’s, 78 (1868), 777–94.

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pose a distinction between the opportunities facing women and the experiences of girls. If women were to ‘descend to the poll with the greengrocer’, as Margaret Oliphant so eloquently put it, girlhood must remain a period of secluded domesticity.11 She points out that Mill’s work on enfranchising women specifically excludes the young: ‘Not you, young ladies, who still dwell in that bower of chintz or dimity which is yours by parental permission . . . To be canvassed, to possess the sweet responsibility of a vote . . . is a promotion that nobody ever dreamt of for you.’12 Oliphant is one of a number of commentators who, while acknowledging the questions (and the dissatisfactions) of modern girls, responded by emphatically endorsing conventional ideals of womanhood. Mrs Roe re-emphasized the importance of maternity to her readership in Wordsworthian terms— ‘the girl is mother to the woman; and further, she is mother to the man also’—and reminded her readers that many great men claim ‘that they were indebted to their mothers for the formation of their characters, and the peculiar bent of their genius’.13 These familiar arguments were now reinforced by a socio-biological discourse, reflecting cultural interest in The Origin of Species (1859). Maternity was subsequently portrayed not only as the highest social and religious duty, but also as ordained by evolution. Inveighing against the education of girls, a contributor to Orby Shipley’s The Church and the World notably turned not to the kinds of religious arguments we saw expressed in Chapter 1, but to biological theories: ‘The more a woman’s mind is cultivated, the less fit she is for the animal functions of motherhood. The mind can only be developed at the expense of the body, and therefore at the expense of any other organism to be formed from the body.’14 This renewed emphasis on the importance of training girls for wife- and motherhood gained further ammunition from John 11 Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Great Unrepresented’, Blackwood’s, 100 (1866), 367– 12 79; 374. Ibid. 370–1. 13 Roe, Woman’s Thoughts, 4, 6. 14 ‘A Mother’, ‘Defects in the Moral Training of Girls’, in Orby Shipley (ed.), The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1868 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), 77–101; 81. For twentieth-century comment on this issue see Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), ch. 4. While some of the most famous articles on the ‘conflict’ between the female brain and body come from the 1870s (by Henry Maudsley and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, for example), Joan Burstyn emphasizes that biological and anthropological debates on the subject date back to the 1860s. See Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980), esp. 75–6.

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Ruskin. In 1865, he published his lecture ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ as part of Sesame and Lilies, a theory of woman as help-meet (and the home as refuge) which was held in high regard throughout the century.15 In the following much-quoted passage, Ruskin outlines his tacit response to the questions, How should a girl be educated? What should she be?: a girl’s education should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy’s; but quite differently directed. A woman, in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different way . . . a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly, while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends.16

Ruskin’s vision of girls’ training carefully ignores the findings of the 1851 Census, of course; it is not clear how his plan of education would benefit society’s ‘surplus’ women.17 ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ achieved a considerable hold over the imaginations of Victorian and twentieth-century commentators alike, perhaps because it provides such a clear expression of the ‘cult’ of womanhood which simultaneously elevated and restricted women. Ruskin was impatient with women’s desires for personal growth; their job, he remarked, was to ‘be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise— wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation’.18 15 In 1899, Alice Corkran noted that her readers were often discouraged by the loftiness of Ruskin’s ideal. Corkran is sympathetic, but argues that they are misunderstanding Ruskin’s purpose: ‘We sail by the pole star, we do not expect to reach it.’ ‘A Chat With the Girl of the Period’, Girl’s Realm, 1 (1899), 965. 16 John Ruskin, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), xviii (1905), 128. Dinah Birch has convincingly argued against Kate Millett’s reading of Ruskin as ‘the supreme expression of all [feminists] need to know and despise about Victorian culture’. Ruskin was interested in and even actively supportive of women’s tertiary education, Birch points out; she also argues that his reading of gender roles was prompted partly by a need to define and work out his own masculinity. Dinah Birch, ‘Ruskin’s “Womanly Mind” ’, Essays in Criticism, 38 (1988), 308–24; 308. However, the remarkable success of Sesame and Lilies does suggest that Ruskin’s vision struck a chord with some portion of Victorian society—that it gave voice, at the very least, to a popular idea of what should constitute masculine and feminine behaviour. 17 During the 1860s, commentators sought to ‘solve’ the problem of the ‘surplus’ woman. W. R. Greg advised mass emigration: Frances Power Cobbe supported some of Greg’s conclusions, but stressed that marriage must be recognized as an option, not a necessity, for women. See Greg, ‘Why are Women Redundant?’, National Review, 14 (1862), 434–60, and Cobbe, ‘What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?’, Essays, 18 58–101. Ruskin, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, 123.

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Ruskin promoted his ideal of self-renouncing young women in the face of wide social concern about the self-interest and the changed identity of modern girlhood. If this was a decade of re-evaluating the mission and thus the training of women, it was also a decade of laments about girls’ selfishness, superficiality, and general unworthiness. In a discussion of ‘young ladies’ in 1863, the Christian Remembrancer expressed itself pained by the contrast between ‘the popular ideal of charming womanhood in the times we remember, and what seems to constitute the modern ideal of the same thing’.19 Similarly, in 1864, Dinah Mulock Craik mourned the fact that girls have become artificial performers: ‘It is rather difficult now-a-days to find a “girl” at all. They are, every one of them, “young ladies”; made up of hoop and flounce, hat and feather, plaits of magnificent (bought) hair, and heaps of artificial flowers.’20 Two years later, Mrs Roe claimed that modern girls were more than just vain, descrying their self-interest: ‘It seems a hard thing to say, but I’m afraid it’s true,— pride and indolence are the crying evils of the present generation of young ladies of the middle classes.’ In 1867, Margaret Oliphant inveighed against girls’ access to novels full of ‘unseemly references and exhibitions of forbidden knowledge’, expressing shock at their depiction of ‘young women, moved either by the wild foolhardiness of inexperience, or by ignorance of everything that is natural and becoming’.21 These criticisms of girlhood came together in Eliza Lynn Linton’s (in)famous article of 1868, ‘The Girl of the Period’: Linton levelled a devastating charge against modern girls, presenting them as superficial, greedy, and amoral. This attack on the personality of the modern girl used familiar terms and arguments. Like the Christian Remembrancer, Linton contrasts ‘the girl of the period, and the fair young English girl of the past’. Like Craik, Linton criticizes the artificialities of youthful female dress: ‘The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face . . .’ Perhaps most memorably, Linton compares the girl with ‘a class of women whom we must not call by their proper—or improper name’. Indeed, Linton stresses that the girl’s identity has become unutterably confused: ‘The imitation of the demi-monde in dress leads to something in manner and 19 ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, Christian Remembrancer, 46 (1863), 209– 36; 209. 20 Dinah Mulock Craik, ‘In Her Teens’, Macmillan’s, 10 (1864), 219. 21 Roe, Woman’s Thoughts, 26; Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s, 102 (1867), 257–80; 258.

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feeling . . . far too like to be honourable to herself or satisfactory to her friends.’ She argues that the girl of the period does not merely behave without conscience before marriage, but that she also marries for money alone: ‘the sooner [a husband] wakes from his hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money on herself . . . the less severe will be his disappointment.’22 But this comparison of girl and prostitute too is familiar; first, because writers like Craik had suggested earlier in the decade that the girl was losing her identity beneath her performative costume; and second, because W. R. Greg had famously associated marriage-hunting women with prostitutes in 1862. Greg, it should be said, simply thought they should charge less: ‘[if women become] less costly articles of furniture, they will find more eager purchasers. To speak broadly, as wives become less expensive and less exigeantes, more men will learn to prefer them to mistresses.’23 Clearly, then, Linton did not paint a new or unusual portrait of girlhood. Indeed, Linton’s antiheroine has famous precedents from the world of fiction also: Brontë’s lazily spoken, flirtatious, moneyand clothes-loving Ginevra Fanshawe, a girl who ‘lived her full life in a ballroom’, is an obvious precursor (Villette, 212). Yet by combining earlier criticisms Linton generated a picture of absolutely deviant female youth; her article created a storm, and the ‘girl of the period’ became a cultural icon.24 Much of the commentary from the rest of the decade is indebted to Linton and builds on her vehement critique of girls’ moral and physical degeneration. ‘Most reluctantly we are compelled to open our eyes to symptoms of deterioration’, one writer complained; ‘Vulgarity is tinging the rising generation of girls, the daughters of true gentlemen and ladies, and it is sad to see.’25 Sarah Stickney Ellis similarly lamented that ‘Many of the external characteristics of absolute daring are now stamped even upon the young and the fair of the gentle sex, upon their dress, their modes of speech, their amusements, and their habits of life . . .’26 22 Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review, 25 (1868), 339– 40; 340. 23 Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, 453. 24 For a useful discussion of the furore over the girl of the period, see Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, 3 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), i. 103–25. 25 ‘A Mother’, ‘Defects in the Moral Training of Girls’, 86. 26 Stickney Ellis, Education of the Heart, 169.

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Yet, as The Girl of the Period Miscellany (a satirical periodical that ran for two issues at the end of the 1860s) argued, the girl of the period was more than just a badly behaved vulgarian, a conservative projection of degenerate modern youth. Asking, ‘What is the Girl of the Period?’ the magazine mused, obliquely: ‘[she is] a natural outgrowth of the circumstances. She is an involuntary protest. She is the masculine Giggle of the Hour. She is the Irony of the Situation. And perhaps we may discover, if we look closely, that she is not such a mere weed as she has been made out to be.’ The real girl of the period threatens more than her elders’ dress codes, the magazine suggests; the article goes on to describe the anarchic nature of modern girls, suggesting that girlhood has become de facto a new political movement: ‘the young women of the period have assumed, however superficially and temporarily, certain characteristics which speak of a slight inefficiency of discipline, but which have also about them a subtle, interrogative flavour of all the new feminine movements.’27 A contributor to St Paul’s Magazine similarly, if even more explicitly, argued that the girl of the period was a phenomenon engendered by the changing roles of women throughout society. The writer defended any apparent peculiarities in the modern young woman on the grounds that all social movements take time to establish themselves: ‘it is idle to imagine that this transition period, during which women are emerging, as a class, from the kitchen and store-room into the study and library, will not be attended with a great amount of extravagance and absurdity.’28 Interestingly, the position of ‘English ladies’ is here described in terms evocative of late girlhood: the writer uses familiar expressions—‘transition period’, ‘emerging’— and applies the trope of occupying different spaces which, as we have seen, was commonly associated with the girl’s transition to womanhood (although the library and study are obviously not the usual locations for an ‘out’ young woman). Mapping the experiences of women who seek education and the franchise on to the experiences of the transitional girl, the writer both associates the girl of the period with wider and more radical debate about women’s roles while also linking the growth to womanhood with the experience of developing a social and political consciousness. 27 ‘The Irony of the Situation’, The Girl of the Period Miscellany, 2 (1869), 33–4; 33, 34. 28 (Edward Dicey?), ‘The Women of the Day’, St Paul’s Magazine, 2 (1868), 303– 14; 312.

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The rest of this chapter will examine a series of 1860s novels that represent young heroines in the process of thinking through—and gradually testing out—what kind of women they would like to become.29 The first section will concentrate on fictions that shadow a heroine’s troublous transitional stage with a narrative of obscured or mistaken identity; the second will focus on the place (and displacement) of marriage in romance texts’ explorations of identity acquisition. Of course, the genre of the Bildungsroman is one we most usually associate with texts of identity formation, and the novels to be examined here do, in some sense, chart a heroine’s Bildung: the protagonists typically experience some form of crisis that encourages them to go out into the world and serve an apprenticeship to adulthood. Feminist critics have noted, however, that the model of the Bildung may only partially reflect female experience in literature: ‘The fully realized and individuated self who caps the journey of the Bildungsroman may not represent the developmental goals of women, or of women characters’, argue the editors of The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983). Judith Kegan Gardiner summarizes their conclusions: ‘The traditional Bildungsroman chronicles a young man’s identity crisis and its resolution in a known social world. Feminist critics find that the female novel of development has its own concerns—apprenticeship to social constraint or sudden awakening—that do not fit a linear model of steady progress.’30 And indeed, the heroine’s behaviour in 1860s novels often vacillates between childlike ignorance and womanly fortitude; protagonists’ efforts to comprehend their identity may involve steady processes of obfuscation instead of gradual clarification; and the end of a novel is by no means necessarily the point of greatest selfawareness on a heroine’s part. Attempts to explain these novels in 29 The view of adolescence as a ‘quest for identity’ was most famously advanced by Erik H. Erikson in Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968). For discussion on how Erikson’s conclusions relate to female development see Elizabeth Douvan, ‘New Sources of Conflict in Females at Adolescence and Early Adulthood’, in Judith M. Bardwick et al. (eds.), Feminine Personality and Conflict (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970), 31–43, and Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Mind Mother: Psychoanalysis and Feminism’, in Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (eds.), Making A Difference (London: Methuen, 1985), 126–7. Gardiner acknowledges that Erikson ‘implies a male paradigm and briefly treats female development as its variant’. She believes, none the less, in the value of Eriksonian analyses, because Erikson emphasized the importance of social, not just instinctual, stages of development (126). 30 Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (eds.), Introduction, The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 10–11; Kegan Gardiner, ‘Mind Mother’, 126.

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the terms of the Bildungsoman may lead us to overlook these unusual patterns—to attempt to shape the novels’ accounts of growth into a more familiar narrative or, perhaps, simply to characterize them as unsuccessful essays in the Bildungsroman form. My own reading attempts to identify the patterns women novelists themselves generated (and exchanged, modified, reshaped) to articulate the complicated process, for a young mid-Victorian woman, of acquiring a sense of herself as adult.

sensational girls ‘On what a slight thread do the events of life turn,’ is the favourite language of this school . . .31

Modern readers of Victorian literature probably equate 1860s popular fiction with the sensation novel. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) have been republished by major publishing houses and have been the focus of extensive literary criticism. Critics have expressed particular interest in the sensation novel’s preoccupation with disguised identities: Jenny Bourne Taylor, for instance, argues that sensation fiction utilized a ‘common pool of narrative tropes’ to give rise to a series of narrative patterns that unravelled ‘a secret identity which in turn disclosed not a truth, but another set of questions and dissemblances’. This recurring narrative structure, she argues, is ultimately used to pose questions about the very nature of human identity: ‘identity itself emerges as a set of elements that are actively constructed within a dominant framework of social interests, perceptions, and values.’32 Yet an important (if almost critically ignored) strain of women’s romance fiction also centred on precisely these narrative and thematic concerns: at the heart of (what I term) ‘sensational romances’ lay tales of long-lost transgressive mothers, of faked deaths and foundling births, that raised similarly teasing questions about the nature and construction of the heroine’s identity. However, rather than becoming melded with the sensation novel ‘proper’, these romances retained an essential 31

‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, 215. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988), 7, 8. 32

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difference: sensation fictions are chiefly suspenseful affairs, while the romance texts encourage identification with a young, idealized, victimized heroine.33 Just as in the sensation novel, heroines of 1860s romances wade through dark histories and embark on adventures filled with ‘secrecy and disguise’ to discover some important truth about their identity.34 The romance novel heroine, however, is generally aged about 17 or 18, and for her the crisis of identity occurs just as she is experiencing (what the narrator of Amabel called) ‘the restless melancholy common to those just entering life’ caused by ‘an unacknowledged, instinctive conviction, that the first encounter with the realities of life will break in upon this state of feeling, and that the heart cannot repose itself in dreams’. The narrative of a secret identity, of disguise, revelation, and ultimate resolution therefore tracks a second narrative of the girl’s development to adulthood and, as I shall argue, provides a means of exploring the problems produced by growth. The heroine’s use of a disguise, for instance, reminds us that she is taking on a new (and uncomfortably alien) physical self, a transitional identity, en route to adulthood. To give a sense of the shape and preoccupations of 1860s sensational romance texts, the plots of three will be summarized here. The first, Lady Charles Thynne’s Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter (1868), is clearly indebted to Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862). As in Collins’s text, illegitimacy haunts two sisters, Florence and Magdalen Fortescue. However, only one of the two girls is illegitimate and no one— including the parents—knows which. The real Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter was stolen as a baby, and later two babies were returned, alike in size and shape. Colonel and Mrs Fortescue do not tell either girl this story, bringing up both as their own in the hope that one day the truth will be revealed. In Holme Lee’s Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes (1863) Annis, an heiress, is raised by her uncle in the absence of her father, who is believed to be dead. Annis herself apparently dies of 33 My definitions of women’s romance and sensation fiction are indebted to, respectively, Sally Mitchell, ‘Sentiment and Suffering: Women’s Recreational Reading in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977), 29–45; esp. 31–4, and Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835–1880 (Bowling Green, Oh.: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981), esp. 74. 34 Taylor, Secret Theatre of Home, 7. For a book-length analysis of sensation writers see Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); see also Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977; London: Virago, 1978), ch. 6; Flint, Woman Reader, ch. 10.

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scarlet fever, leaving the uncle as heir: it turns out that her death is faked, and she has been spirited away. She is brought up as ‘Alice’ by two sisters who know nothing of her past, and despite meetings with former family members, for a long time nothing is suspected. The plot of Isabella Neil Harwood’s Carleton Grange (1866) is especially marvellous. The heroine learns that she is not, as she has always thought, ‘Maud Fleming’: she is told by Francis Godfrey, her father’s blackmailer, that she is her father’s illegitimate child, brought in secretly as a substitute for the legitimate daughter, who died young. Without a daughter as heiress, Gilbert would have to resign his control of Carleton Grange. It turns out that Maud is actually not Gilbert’s daughter, but the long-lost child of Lady Rosamund Carleton, who is the real owner of the Grange—and therefore Maud is, after all, heiress to the house. She was stolen by Gilbert because, with baby Rosamund out of the way, his own daughter inherited the property. As we have already learned, the daughter subsequently died, and Gilbert attempted to make some reparation by bringing up baby Rosamund as his own child, Maud, so that the right child would inherit the property. Substantial continental trips at various points concealed these exchanges from the rest of the family; Francis Godfrey had (perhaps unsurprisingly) drawn the wrong conclusions from facts given him and events witnessed, but had enough of the truth to extract money from Gilbert Fleming. Spinning web after extraordinary web, these novels rewrite the fairy tale in a contemporary setting: she talked out of the dreamy imaginations of her heart such a chapter of fancies as her sober-minded hearer would never have expected to find anywhere save in the pages of a romance. She seemed to suppose herself some sort of lost princess; but ‘alas!’ thought Rachel [Annis’s guardian], ‘these are not the days of fairy-tale transformations, and there is no possibility of your ever turning out to be other than a poor little Cinderella rescued by the ladies at Brookhall from quite common-place neglect and destitution!’ (Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes, ii. 267)35

In fact, sensational romance texts create a world in which ‘fairy-tale transformations’ are the norm: these are novels where the ‘soberminded’ are imperceptive, where implausible dreams of sudden access to love, rank, and happiness are fulfilled. They suggest a world 35 ‘Holme Lee’ (Harriet Parr), Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1863), hereafter referenced parenthetically as AWF.

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in which, despite networks of secrets, there are underlying coherencies which ensure a happy-ever-after resolution. The plots of confused identities, of one character being mistaken for another, impel the novels to formulate definitions for concrete identification. This can take an obvious physical form in the shape of a birthmark: the identity of Colonel Fortescue’s daughter is finally revealed when a guilty nurse reappears and testifies that the girl had a mark on her hairline, for example. More commonly, a series of implausible coincidences reveals the truth, establishing and legitimizing the heroine. Such strategies ultimately prevent the novels from formulating more complex answers to girls’ identity crises—to the problems that face young women as they confront the world’s painful realities. At the same time, however, they position a girl’s experience of identity confusion centre stage. The novels’ early chapters usually include a scene in which heroines first express their sense that the peace and stability of childhood is threatened. Thynne’s Fortescue sisters begin to realize that a secret, like ‘a kind of cloud’, surrounds their birth: ‘It was something mysterious and intangible; something uncertain in their relations with their mother . . .’ (Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter, i. 140).36 Annis Warleigh is baffled by memories she cannot explain, memories that hint at another life lived: ‘“Have you ever heard or read of such a thing as the whole of life being foreseen in a vision? I think I must so have foreseen mine . . .”’ (AWF ii. 265). Strange visions similarly crowd Maud Fleming’s mind when Francis Godfrey tells her she is illegitimate: ‘long-dormant memories seemed to stir within her; and, like the recollection of a dream in the far away past, there rose before her a vision of long dismal streets, with dark pools of wet glistening in the dim light of an occasional lamp’ (Carleton Grange, ii. 19).37 These visions are literal recollections, but they are also metaphorical: seeing as yet only darkly, the heroine’s passage forward involves tracing paths back into the past, as the novel maps her into a network of family secrets and inheritances through which her identity is ultimately reconstructed. Maud has been living in a state of greater delusion than the other heroines. She is, therefore, ‘abruptly awakened from her golden dreams’ by Godfrey’s stark tale: ‘A glamour had been before her eyes 36 Lady Charles Thynne, Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868), hereafter referenced parenthetically as CFD. 37 Isabella Neil Harwood, Carleton Grange, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1866), hereafter referenced parenthetically as CG.

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all her life, and now that it was taken off she almost hated the happiness of youth as having been imposed on her under false pretences’ (CG ii. 50). Like Margaret Holt, the sense of divorce from childhood centres on the discovery that her vision of her mother was a fantasy. Having recently attended the death of an unknown woman, she thinks now that ‘the mother whose memory she had cherished and revered as the type of all virtue and nobility was a fallen guilty woman, reduced to ask pardon on her death-bed from her own child’ (CG ii. 24). Maud’s sense of selfhood is immediately threatened (‘her self-respect was gone from her’ (CG ii. 50)); Godfrey, moreover, forces her to see the broader social consequences of her mother’s actions—their direct impact on her social standing. He advises her not to call the servants to have him ejected because she is no longer their lawful mistress, and ‘“Who you really are—that is, to what name you are properly entitled—I should unfortunately not be able at this precise moment to tell them.”’ Illegitimate children, he taunts her, ‘“take the patronymic of the mother, not of the father; and what your mother’s name was I cannot just at present recollect”’ (CG ii. 9–10). What’s in a name? Harwood reveals just how much is lost when one’s legal identity is called into question: It was as though the sense of her own personality—that sense which distinguishes thinking, reasoning life from mere sentient existence—had been rudely torn away from her, leaving her whole being a dull aching void. It was not only that she was no longer Maud Fleming, owner of Carleton Grange; the loss of a mere external identity would have troubled her little if with it she had not lost hopes, memories, and beliefs which had constituted an identity far dearer than that conferred by the right to bear a certain name and to enjoy certain property. But in ceasing to be Maud Fleming she had almost ceased to be everything that but a few hours ago she had been. The whole fabric of her being, in the past, the present, and the future, in its relations internal and external, had been shaken to the very foundation. (CG ii. 49)

After such a huge shock to ‘the very foundation’ of her sense of her identity, Maud, musing by a river, ponders throwing herself into its ‘clear tempting depths’ (CG ii. 57). She is, after all, effectively a fallen woman; she has lost her ‘good name’, and, as Dickens’s Martha in David Copperfield reveals, a girl in such a position may well feel that death beckons.38 Ultimately Maud does not commit suicide, but she 38 Erikson’s formulation of adolescent trauma resonates here: ‘I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle

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ends her life as ‘Maud Fleming’ and takes on a new identity by adopting another name and disguising herself as a governess. This tactic facilitates the resolution of the plot by bringing Maud into contact with Lady Rosamund Carleton (and subsequently with a painting of herself as a child), but the period of disguise also stands in for the schismatic phase between childhood and womanhood. Maud literally becomes a new person, dressed in alien clothes and acting an alien part; the condition of being incognito allows the writer to explore what it feels like to be dramatically divorced from the simple pleasures of youth and to take on a new identity, with new and more adult responsibilities. Disguise is key to the development of plot and character in sensation fiction, of course, and it does not necessarily figure as an adolescence in such texts. Wood’s Isabel Vane returns to her old home as a governess in order to be close to her children; Braddon’s governess Lucy Graham, later Lady Audley, was Helen Talboys in disguise, while the young heroine of Braddon’s Eleanor’s Victory (1863) becomes a governess and spies on the murderer of her father. Sensation heroines typically use disguise for self-serving reasons, to achieve their own ends and social remuneration by underhanded means; disguise allows them to dispense with their own identity and secure a new, more profitable one.39 Yet in romance novels, the heroines are typically forced into their disguise, adopting it not to pursue a selfdefined goal but rather to hide themselves from maltreatment or from the shame of their own namelessness. Romance and sensation heroines also adopt importantly different kinds of disguises. In Mrs Grey’s Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady (1861), the 18-yearold heroine Linda, escaping from her mad husband Norman on their wedding day, innocently dresses in the trappings of the transgressive woman: ‘a lugubrious black bonnet with its long heavy crape fall, which must effectually have hidden every part of the face of the when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood . . .’ Maud also discovers that her conception of the past is now unusable, and with it she loses her sense of ‘the present, and the future’. ‘[A]bruptly awakened from her golden dreams’, Maud feels ‘totally severed from her former self’ (CG ii. 51). Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958), 36. 39 My argument here is indebted to Nina Auerbach’s discussion of Collins’s Magdalen in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 161.

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wearer save the eyes, the only part not left in impenetrable darkness by the double folding of the thick material’ (Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady, i. 43).40 A Londoner passing such a woman would immediately suspect sexual deviancy: in Annie Edwardes’s Susan Fielding (1869), the antiheroine Portia tells innocent Susan how women of the metropolis ‘visit doubtful resorts’: ‘thickly veiled, and plainly dressed, a young lady with common sense in her head can go wherever she thinks fit’ (Susan Fielding, ii. 259, 200).41 Braddon’s wicked Lady Audley, on the other hand, impersonates a virtuous girl: ‘The innocence and candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley’s fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes . . . She owned to twenty years of age, but it was hard to believe her more than seventeen’ (Lady Audley’s Secret, 52).42 The romance heroines concealed in black bonnets and thick veils are revealed to be chaste girls with honourable motives; the sensation novel’s protagonist, with girlish candour shining in her face, turns out to be a woman hiding dark secrets of murder, bigamy, and madness. In a sense, then, the romance text reverses the sensation prototype: if the sensation novel undermines the ideal of fair English girlhood, romance texts stress that female deviancy is not always what it seems. The transitional girl’s use of a disguise expresses her uncertain identity, rather than concealing it: the plot device of mistaken identity leads her to represent her own innately indeterminate character. Romance novels stress, however, that an uncertain identity is dangerous in a society that places a high value on character, and that usually takes the ‘no smoke without fire’ approach to a woman’s reputation. ‘[A] woman never is under a cloud undeservedly; it always turns out that she has done something to deserve odium sooner or later’, remarks the rakish Mr Carlyon in Annie Thomas’s Only Herself (1869, iii. 85–6).43 The girl who finds herself ‘talked about’ (which, in an era of uproar over the ‘girl of the period’, was arguably every young woman in Britain) will quickly find herself ranked with ‘a class of women whom we must not call by their 40 Elizabeth Caroline Grey, Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1862). 41 Annie Edwardes, Susan Fielding, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1869), hereafter referenced parenthetically as SF. 42 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 43 ‘Mrs Pender Cudlip’ (Annie Thomas), Only Herself, 3 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1869), hereafter referenced parenthetically as OH.

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proper—or improper—name’.44 The slippery, ill-defined condition of girlhood thus becomes painfully akin to the condition of the fallen woman. And indeed, girls in fiction of the period often find themselves characterized—quickly, with little warning—as sexually transgressive. So, for example, in Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter, Magdalen’s concealed ‘past life’ (CFD ii. 133) leads her fiancé, Sir Harry, to suspect sexual impropriety. He receives a letter which tells him ‘“Miss Magdalen is not what she seems to be”’ (CFD ii. 3) and, fearing Michael Audley’s fate perhaps, he immediately assumes this refers to some sexual transgression: ‘Had he all the time been deceived in Magdalen?—was it possible that the true, gentle, loving nature he had worshipped was in reality designing and deceitful?’ (CFD ii. 89). Thynne’s novel proceeds to challenge Sir Harry’s assumptions (and, perhaps, the reader’s associations with the name Magdalen); Sir Harry’s interpretation of the girl’s actions is shown to be hasty and unjust. The ‘gentle, loving’ girl is precisely what she seems: it was the letter that was not what it appeared. Written by a largely illiterate woman who believed herself to be Magdalen’s grandmother, the letter was intended to recommend the girl to Sir Harry. The text entirely validates Magdalen’s ensuing behaviour: ending the engagement because of Sir Harry’s suspicions, Magdalen reproves her fiancé in terms which emphasize her integrity: ‘“It is not that I doubt your love; but, to me, love without trust is valueless . . .”’ (CFD ii. 156). In general a most orthodox Victorian heroine, she strongly rejects his attempts to ‘claim’ knowledge of her history: ‘“though the present and the future may be yours by right, the past, interwoven as it is with the lives of others, cannot belong either to you or to myself exclusively”’ (CFD ii. 157). Given that, as Magdalen indicates, a girl lost control of her present and future at the altar (this was, of course, an era in which debates raged over a woman’s rights to a separate legal existence after marriage), a young woman’s past becomes a site of contest. Sensation novels position dark secrets in a woman’s youth: romance texts, on the other hand, reidentify ‘a girl’s past’, suggesting it should not be a euphemism for deviancy but rather a private stock of experience. In ‘The Great Unrepresented’, Margaret Oliphant defines girlhood as a period of confusion and uncertain identity—a conception of girl44

Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, 340.

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hood that sensational romance novels dramatize through plots of foundlings, changelings, and impersonations. Girls, Oliphant says: may object, and do object, to the disabilities which are sometimes rather hard upon them; but by the time a woman has come to the mature age at which she can understand herself and her destiny, she has in most cases got to see the justice of it, and learned to identify herself distinctly in the world.45

At the end of these novels, the heroines too seem to have come to ‘identify themselves distinctly in the world’. Acquiring land, lineage, and legitimacy, the confusions and indeterminacy of their girlhood seem resolved. Yet the heroine herself usually fails to understand the full chain of events. While the novels set up the action to explore her identity, the resolution of her uncertain state does not occur in her own consciousness: rather, her identity is finally presented to her as a fait accompli by another character. For example, while the reader has long realized that Lady Rosamund is Maud’s mother, Harwood’s heroine only feels some special bond between them. She longs vaguely for a closer connection to her mistress: ‘she fell asleep, dreaming that somehow a strange transformation had taken place by which she was altogether metamorphosed from her former self, and enabled without fear of consequences to live in one household with Lady Rosamund’ (CG iii. 69). As the reader of Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes knows, these are the days of ‘fairy-tale transformations’, and Maud’s father finally discloses the improbable truth. Maud becomes a great heiress, elevated in a moment from poverty to wealth, from governess to titled lady. Now safely named, she is also at liberty to marry her former lover, Philip Ormond. The pleasure of fantasy is fulfilled; the threat of uncertain identity vanishes in a second, chased away by the doubly stable position of wife and aristocrat. Maud’s prophetic dream means that she does not need to take conscious steps to comprehend her own identity. The secrets of the text are worked out as much in the reader’s mind as on the page: it is she who recognizes the heroine’s adolescent turmoil, puts the facts of her past together, and ultimately identifies the girl’s position in the world. It is worth, therefore, turning our attention from the heroine’s psyche to that of the reader for a moment, and pondering the particular pleasures offered by such texts. Janice Radway, in her influential evaluation of twentieth-century romance reading, argues that women’s fantasies typically privilege values constructed as 45

Oliphant, ‘The Great Unrepresented’, 376.

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‘feminine’, creating a space for women to explore needs that generally go unmet. ‘In the end,’ she concludes, ‘the romance-reading process gives the reader a strategy for making her present situation more comfortable without substantive reordering of its structure . . .’ 46 Sally Mitchell makes a similar argument in her account of 1860s fictions specifically: Mitchell argues that such texts essentially express and validate daydreams, and that daydreams provide women with an outlet for unregarded emotions and unsatisfied needs. ‘Daydreams are pleasurable because they provide expression, release, or simply indulgence for emotions or needs which are not otherwise satisfied, either because of psychological inhibition or because of the social context’, she contends.47 The relationship between daydreams and 1860s women’s novels gains even greater significance when we consider that the texts, which focus on a transitional heroine, offer a literary version of an activity which has a particular role during maturation. Arthur Jersild, writing in the 1960s, describes daydreaming as more than ‘just a means of fleeing from a real to an unreal world’: Through his imagination [the adolescent] struggles with unresolved problems from [the] past. He strives to meet demands that press upon him from within and without. He gives structure to his hopes for the future . . . Even when the adolescent’s daydreams seem to be an unrealistic kind of wishfulfilment and escape, these dreams are not completely idle. He is perhaps doing the best he can to make the conditions of his life tolerable.48

The daydream provides an enabling imaginary space, in other words, allowing the individual to escape from an unsympathetic world, to resolve questions about her youth and also to give shape to 46 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 214. 47 Mitchell, ‘Sentiment and Suffering’, 32. 48 Arthur T. Jersild, The Psychology of Adolescence (1953; 2nd edn., New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), 151. Freud notoriously argued that male and female daydreams differed: ‘In young women erotic wishes dominate the phantasies almost exclusively . . . in young men egoistic and ambitious wishes assert themselves plainly enough alongside their erotic desires.’ Sigmund Freud, On Creativity and the Unconscious, trans. i. F. Grant Duff (New York: Harper, 1958), 47–8. Nancy K. Miller argues that Freud’s theory has come to structure a restrictive set of ideas about narrative, which devalue the plots and preoccupations of women’s writing. Miller argues that women’s and men’s fictions are predicated both on ambitions and on erotic desires. See Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’ (1981), in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (1985; London: Virago, 1996), 339–60. In the spirit of Miller’s argument, and given the obvious parallels between the commentaries of Radway, Mitchell, and Jersild, I take the latter’s account as containing relevant remarks about both male and female daydreams.

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her plans for adulthood. Dreams clearly function in much this way in Carleton Grange (when Maud dreams of being liberated from drudgery and becoming an aristocrat); in Eliza L. Riddell’s Phemie Keller (1866), a beleaguered 16 year old similarly daydreams of future riches, and the author explicitly remarks that such ‘dreams and . . . visions . . . made her young life tolerable to her’ (Phemie Keller, i. 85).49 Victorian women writers seem to have been aware of the compensatory properties of dreams, in other words, and also to have associated such fantasies with the dissatisfied young girl. Dinah Craik portrays girlhood in ‘In Her Teens’ as a period of ‘crisis in which the whole ear and brain are full of tumult, when all life looks strange and bewildering—delirious with exquisite unrealities—and agonised with griefs equally chimerical and unnatural’. This evocation of ‘exquisite unrealities’ may again suggest the world of daydream, a world in which the individual can escape the ‘bewildering’ facts of the world before her. And while Craik insists on the trauma of teenage years, she reveals an ambiguous response to the ‘peace’ of adulthood: ‘All these things may have calmed down now; the troubled chaos has long settled into a perfect—and yet how imperfect!—world . . .’50 If adulthood brings knowledge of the world’s imperfections, the sensational romance novel recreates the psychic experience of girlhood for the adult woman reader. Novels like Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes are stories of ‘exquisite unrealities’, stories that validate their heroines’ ‘chapter of fancies’ and reject more ‘commonplace’ interpretations of events (Annis is not, as her guardian suspected, an illegitimate child but a secret heiress after all). While the transition to womanhood involves, in the first place, acquiring knowledge of ‘the realities of life’ (the kind of disillusioning realizations we saw represented in romance fictions of the 1850s), the 1860s texts latterly offer their readers a more compensatory reading experience. Novels like Carleton Grange validate the ‘golden dreams’ of youth, returning to Eden, as it were. While this may indicate a desire to avoid adulthood, it also facilitates a return to the enabling possibilities, the ‘boundless aspirations’ of youth. 1850s texts tended to suggest that ‘the heart cannot repose itself in dreams’; the novels examined here seem to ask, why not? 49 ‘F. G. Trafford’ (Eliza L. Riddell), Phemie Keller, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1866), hereafter referenced parenthetically as PK. 50 Craik, ‘In Her Teens’, 220.

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‘The romance of life’ often, indeed famously, ends in marriage in nineteenth-century literature. While courtship and engagement may facilitate new experiences and interesting misunderstandings during a girl’s youth, marriage is regularly predicated on stability, acceptance, resolution. Consequently, marriage closes a plethora of texts and a multitude of complicated girlhoods—as in, for example, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, North and South, and Wives and Daughters (Gaskell’s unwritten final chapter would surely have represented Molly and Roger’s happy union). Marriage represents not only the end of exploratory, difficult, narcissistic youth but also the beginning of a more sober, ‘monotonous’, selfabnegating existence—an existence, in other words, decidedly lacking in narrative interest. This plot construction apparently reflects, even re-enforces, the idea that marriage conferred adulthood and that maturity for women constituted a less playful and more dutiful existence: it also suggests that ‘true womanhood’ must be less visible, since it is located after the close of the text. Yet, as we have seen, even those novels that close girlhood with marriage may simultaneously represent maturation as an essentially psychological phenomenon. Marriage in sensational romances may be little more than a coup de théâtre, an implausible dramatic ploy to confer wealth and status on the heroine. The growth of the inner life constitutes a second narrative, one that is not necessarily capped or resolved by the novel’s happy-ever-after conclusion. Moreover, not all texts of the period conclude with marriage; death comes, famously, for independent-minded girls such as Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver. Unable to find and/or accept a stable adult role, Eliot illustrates the disaster that confronts a young woman who cannot ‘bridge the brook and the river’, as Longfellow put it. Caught between competing imperatives of love, duty, and personal responsi51 Amelia B. Edwards, Barbara’s History, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864).

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bility throughout the text, Maggie finally drowns in the river’s ‘swift advance’ and ‘broad expanse’.52 Indeed, the girl’s first thoughts when the overflowing Floss swirls beneath her door reveal her intense unwillingness to accept the future before her, her relief that the river has taken control of her existence: ‘In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading: it was the transition of death . . .’ (MF 517, my italics). Generations of readers have been dissatisfied with this ending; Dinah Craik pondered in an 1861 review of Eliot’s novel what sort of example Maggie’s death was setting the ‘hundreds of clever girls, born of uncongenial parents’.53 The novel’s tragic conclusion can in fact be read as a commentary on the paucity of available models of womanhood; on the very real difficulty for ‘clever girls’—particularly those with ‘uncongenial parents’—of ‘bridging the interval’ satisfactorily, of attaining womanhood if not through marriage. However, if we turn from Eliot’s text to other, less well-known women’s novels, we discover that some writers were dealing with the problem by engaging with perceptions of marriage as final—as completing the narrative of a young woman’s life. Some 1860s romance fictions, for instance, depict nuptials at the beginning or in the middle of the text, and then narrate their impact on a young heroine’s psychology. These texts typically represent marriage as destructive to personal development: girls become emotionally and physically frozen after their wedding, only thawing later in the novel by falling in love with someone other than their husbands. (This is substantially the plot of Eliot’s later novel, Middlemarch, of course.) Other texts lead their heroines through a courtship plot only to stress that maturation is finally achieved by rejecting marriage. These heroines (including Trollope’s Lily from The Small House at Allington, 1864), attain a more mature sense of selfhood by recognizing their fiancé’s unworthiness. Indeed, as we shall see, fictions centring on love and romance from this period regularly conclude with an assertion of self-reliance instead of a romantic tableau, thereby resisting readers’ assumptions about the ‘right’ conclusion for a romance narrative. Marriage, displaced from its position as the concluding event of a young girl’s life, 52 These terms are from the fourth verse of ‘Maidenhood’: ‘Gazing, with a timid glance, | On the brooklet’s swift advance, | On the river’s broad expanse!’ 53 Dinah Mulock Craik, ‘The Mill on the Floss’, Macmillan’s, 3 (1861); qtd. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 130.

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becomes at worst a hurdle and at best a staging-post in the transition to adulthood. The image of the natural girl retained its popularity in popular fiction of the 1860s, despite critics’ scornful treatment of the motif. Margaret Oliphant disdainfully referenced the multiplicity of ‘Illbrought-up motherless girls, left to grow anyhow, out of all feminine guardianship’ in her article on ‘Novels’; in 1863 the Christian Remembrancer expressed itself similarly baffled by the regular occurrence of such images in sensation fiction, noting: the unrestrained ‘expansive natures,’ unchecked by system of any sort, whose youth has been suffered to run wild, do what they like, form their own opinions, get into scrapes, and compromise themselves while still in their teens . . . Nothing is so purely conventional an idea as that young girls untaught or ill-taught can be graceful and attractive, however favourite a notion it is with writers of fiction.54

Maggie Tulliver may be seen as a particularly famous example of an 1860s heroine ‘whose youth has been suffered to run wild’, who has ‘formed her own opinions, got into scrapes, and compromised herself’;55 in this, she is sister to a host of girls in popular fiction of the period. For the victimized, suffering, misunderstood natural girl was positively ubiquitous in contemporary women’s romances. Riddell’s Phemie Keller, for instance, centres a young, uneducated heroine who falls foul of her family’s—and society’s—conceptions of a young woman’s responsibilities: forced into a socially advantageous marriage against her will, the girl’s rich emotional and psychological life becomes deadened. Riddell accentuates her motherless heroine’s innocence, youth, and lack of worldly ambition in the early stages of the novel by emphasizing her love of the pastoral. Rather as Philip Earnscliff finds Marguerite St John dreaming by the edge of a pond in The Morals of Mayfair, so Phemie’s husband-to-be, Captain Stondon, discovers the girl rambling on the hills near her home. In both cases, the meeting signifies not just the initiation of the plot’s main action, but also the advent of danger.56 54

Oliphant, ‘Novels’, 265; ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, 233. Eliot invokes the narrative of the garden of Eden on several occasions. For example, in the final paragraph of ‘School-Time’, she relates the Tulliver childrens’ distress at their father’s financial failure to the expulsion from Eden: ‘They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow . . . They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them’ (MF 191). 56 Like Marguerite St John, Maggie Tulliver is depicted ‘ “wanderin’ up an’ down by the water, like a wild thing” ’ in the early pages of Eliot’s novel: her mother prophetically warns that the girl will ‘ “tumble in some day” ’ (MF 12). 55

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Captain Stondon, a wealthy and well-established gentleman of 56, falls passionately in love with the 16-year-old Phemie and courts her determinedly. Phemie’s daydreams prove invaluable as Stondon begins his siege, allowing her to evade her beau’s attempts to penetrate her character: Phemie talked to this stranger of everything save the dreams she dreamed when she lay wide awake in her little bed at night . . . And so while they talked together, and while Captain Stondon thought he was reading this girl’s nature as though it were an easy book Phemie was keeping back the dreams and the visions that made her young life tolerable to her. (PK i. 83–4, 85)

Rather like Aurora Leigh (who is able to keep ‘the life thrust on me, on the outside | Of the inner life with all its ample room’ (Aurora Leigh, 1856, i. 478–9)), Phemie divides her inner and outer selves, preserving her inner self while performing her social duty.57 In twentieth-century terms, she is arguably learning to be an adolescent: J. A. Appleyard has described the adolescent reader in terms that must remind us of Phemie’s process of self-division. Adolescents experience the ‘inner self as the locus of unique feelings, opinions, and thoughts’, he remarks: ‘The inner self is seen as authentic, the outer self a social role to be played, an appearance put on for others.’58 Phemie’s behaviour also resonates with that of other nineteenth-century heroines who struggle to resist an externally imposed social role: Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier learns in The Awakening (1899) to live ‘the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions’.59 1860s romance novels characteristically authorize their heroines to formulate strategies for survival in an alien and alienating environment. Mrs Egerton, author of The Countess’s Cross (1868), explains that her second heroine, Gertrude, is also under siege, her ‘nature’ constantly checked and inhibited by her mother’s shallow efforts ‘to inculcate the maxims of the conventional and advantageous’. Yet whatever her family does to ‘coerce her’ and ‘straitlace her mind’, there always remained a little burning spot in her heart, a wild upward longing, a yearning for something better, higher, which her instructors and 57

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856; Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). J. A. Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 96–7. 59 Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899; London: Penguin, 1984), 57. 58

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parents never could get rid of. At eighteen Gertrude was utterly different from most girls; the beaten track did not suffice for her—she was ever wanting to diverge to the right and to the left, to seek out new paths for herself, and find answers to doubting questions, and work out problems which would never have entered the head of other girls. (The Countess’s Cross, i. 177–8)60

Egerton characterizes her heroine as a site of conflict, clearly distinguishing Gertrude’s insurgent natural impulses from her mother’s attempts ‘to fit her for society’. Indeed, Egerton’s construction of this conflict relates Gertrude to many fin de siècle New Woman heroines: like Caird’s Leonore or Hadria, like Grand’s Evadne or Beth, Gertrude manages to veer from ‘the beaten track’, her ‘wild upward longing’ inexorably asserting itself in spite of her training. Gertrude’s subsequent marriage is partly motivated by her desire for freedom: she agrees to wed the Earl of Chillingworth to escape the restraints of home and to find some purpose in life. Thirty years later, in a memorable scene in The Heavenly Twins, Angelica stamps her foot at Mr Kilroy and shouts ‘Marry me! . . . Marry me, and let me do as I like’ (The Heavenly Twins, 321).61 Her 1860s precursor, Gertrude, muses: ‘Here my life is perfectly aimless and objectless. I am of no use to anyone . . . if I marry, I may learn to love my husband in time—and at any rate, I shall have a larger sphere of action’ (CC i. 182). She is also, however, forced into the bargain by her rapacious mother, who gives her an ultimatum: marry or retire from society. Phemie Keller’s girlish dreams only hold off Captain Stondon for a short while; they are no match for the awesome barrage of incentives that, according to society, accompany his offer of marriage. The rhetoric of the narrative shifts quickly from the pastoral to the mercantile to stress the value system in which Phemie now finds herself: [Phemie] had over-rated her goods; she had been like a man with a clever invention, who never thinks of making hundreds of it, but always millions, until some one offers him, say a thousand pounds, with which all his friends consider he ought to believe himself overpaid. So long as her little possessions were kept out of the market she placed a price on them far and away above their actual value; but now, when she saw the precise sum at which she was rated by other people, her spirits sank to zero. (PK i. 171–2) 60 ‘Mrs Egerton’, The Countess’s Cross, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868), hereafter referenced parenthetically as CC. 61 ‘Sarah Grand’ (Frances McFall), The Heavenly Twins (1893; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), hereafter referenced parenthetically as Twins.

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Riddell describes Phemie not just as a commodity, but as the possessor of marketable goods: the girl is forced to realize both that society places a low value on her virginity and that she is expected to sell herself. Like The Countess’s Cross, Phemie Keller passionately argues against social conceptions of marriage as a means of acquiring wealth and increased social status rather than a signifier of mutual desire. The novels subsequently generate their own value system, in which ardent love and physical desire are valorized as the true motivations for marriage. In the first place, the texts stress that marriages based on any other foundation will prove enervating: this is exemplified as narratives describe how their heroine’s emotional development is checked by marriage. Riddell emphasizes Phemie’s continued authenticity by relating her to unripe flowers and plants on her wedding day: ‘Ere ever the wild roses put forth buds—ere ever the honeysuckle climbing among thorn and briar and bramble began to scent the air with its delicious fragrance—in the spring-time of her young life—in the first bloom and blush of her rare loveliness—Phemie became a wife’ (PK i. 223). This natural imagery also, of course, stresses her potential for growth; for full bloom. Yet marriage uproots Phemie from her familiar and beloved surroundings, transplanting her into an alien environment: ‘from all old friends—from all old haunts—from all old habits—Phemie Keller was passing swiftly away’, Riddell’s narrator mourns. ‘She was going to be another Phemie . . .’ (PK i. 227, 228). Marriage brings a new social identity, but Riddell emphasizes that this change entails profound loss—that it is even uncomfortably close to death (‘Phemie Keller was passing swiftly away’).62 And, when the narrator rejoins Phemie five years later, she notes that the young woman has become petrified, that growth has been arrested; ‘the shy, blushing girl’ has become ‘“as beautiful as ice in sunshine, as snow in summer. She is as polished as marble, as cold as steel”’ (PK ii. 46). She only ‘comes alive’ again several years later, when she falls in love with her husband’s heir. Marriage itself has stilled her maturation. Gertrude too is frozen by her marriage, feeling powerful physical 62 Similarly, in Margaret Oliphant’s Agnes, the heroine’s blacksmith father, watching his daughter marrying a man of higher rank, feels as if ‘it had been the burial instead of the marriage of his daughter . . . He saw his child going, fearless and ignorant, into a world almost as unknown to him as the world on the other side of the grave.’ Oliphant, Agnes (1865; London: Hurst & Blackett, 1867), 65.

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revulsion for the man lying next to her in bed and anger at her mother for betraying her into such a contract: Day by day Gertrude saw her illusions vanish, her youth pass away in this society, and she would bitterly take out her diamonds, and looking earnestly at them say, ‘And these cold, useless things are what I sold myself for!’ And then, in the long hours of the night, as she lay in bed, while the stalwart frame of the Earl beside her shook with the violence of his loud and healthy snoring, clasping her hands, while the hot, burning tears ran down her cheeks, and her heart felt as if it would burst, she would exclaim— ‘Oh! mother, you knew what marriage was, and you persuaded me to this!’ (CC i. 192–3)

Egerton contrasts the chilly diamonds with her heroine’s hot tears: the text subsequently expands this opposition into a wider conflict between a girl’s passion and the emotionless mores of society. Such social censure is far from unusual: a number of novels similarly stress that marriage or engagement founded on anything but love will leave the heroine sexually frozen. Rhoda Broughton’s lively heroine Nell in Cometh Up as a Flower (1867) is tricked into marriage two-thirds of the way through the narrative by her evil, scheming sister Dolly, who wants Nell to marry the wealthy Sir Hugh Lancaster to save the family fortunes. Nell, who really loves a young blond Viking named Dick M’Gregor, is revolted by her fiancé’s touch: ‘His arm is round my waist, and he is brushing my eyes and cheeks and brow . . . as often as he feels inclined—for am I not his property? . . . has he not bought me?’ (Cometh Up as a Flower, 221–2).63 These novels indicate, moreover, that the process of disillusionment, the acquisition of adult knowledge, does not necessarily constitute or represent a complete ‘awakening’ for a young girl: heroines develop the consciousness of their social status around the time of their marriage, but their lack of sexual arousal exemplifies their lack of emotional development. Eliza Lynn Linton accused the girl of the period of commodifying herself: ‘The legal barter of herself for so much money . . . that is her idea of marriage . . .’64 Novels such as Phemie Keller, The Countess’s Cross, and Cometh Up as a Flower emphasize that this ‘legal barter’ is imposed on the girl; that she does not take the role of sanctioned prostitute willingly. Technically, Phemie, Gertrude, and Nell marry 63 64

Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower (1867; Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993). Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, 340.

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for less-than-perfect motives: all are persuaded to marry a man of wealth and higher rank so as to achieve the goods of life. However, all three marry against their better judgement (Phemie marries primarily out of obedience to her aunt and uncle, who long to see their niece well settled). In each case, the discourse of naturalness and authenticity surrounding the girl and her inner desires is succeeded by a rhetoric of industry and commercialization as the girl who cometh up as a flower gains knowledge of her commodified status. The picture of Gertrude’s upbringing in particular supports Leonore Davidoff’s description of a Victorian middle-class girl’s training: ‘A girl’s whole life from babyhood was oriented to the part she had to play in this “status theatre.”’65 Such marriages, Davidoff notes, use girls as players, as performers in a wider social business; given that a girl took on the rank of her husband’s family, it was imperative that she married up, not down. And indeed, 1860s novelists apply metaphors of acting and performance in their wedding scenes, particularly if the marriage unites different social classes. Thus Riddell points out that Phemie now has ‘a different part to play’ while Margaret Oliphant’s Agnes, a blacksmith’s daughter, emerges from the church ‘clothed in her new name and office’ (Agnes, 64). The economic bondage of women was not, of course, an unusual or new topic in the 1860s; the traumatic marriage of Edith and Mr Dombey (back in 1848) was one of many unions presented as little more than a form of legal prostitution. ‘“You know [Dombey] has bought me,”’ Edith tells her mother before the wedding, filled with self-revulsion: ‘“He has considered of his bargain; he has shown it to his friend; he is even rather proud of it; he thinks that it will suit him, and may be had sufficiently cheap; and he will buy to-morrow. God, that I have lived for this . . .”’(Dombey and Son, 472).66 Yet, unlike Dickens, romantic novelists of the 1860s typically present intense sexual passion as the ideal counterpoint to marriage as economic exchange—as the one true reason for union. Margaret Oliphant, as we saw in the last chapter, mourned Jane Eyre’s insurgent, pre-marital desire: in romance novels of the 1860s, physical passion distinguishes 65

Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles (1973; London: Cresset, 1986), 50. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848; London: Penguin, 1985). After the marriage, Edith’s jewels, like Gertrude’s, become a symbol of the exchange the wife has made (body for wealth): ‘The very diamonds—a marriage gift—that rose and fell impatiently upon her bosom, seemed to pant to break the chain that clasped them round her neck, and roll down on the floor where she might tread upon them’ (Dombey and Son, 651). 66

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the ‘authentic’ heroine from the social player. Thus Mrs Egerton contrasts two heroines in The Countess’s Cross, Gertrude who, as we have seen, is revolted by her snoring wealthy husband, and Maddalena, who falls passionately in love with a young Englishman named Arthur. Egerton celebrates Maddalena’s desire for her fiancé, specifically stressing the virtue of such passion: Her own heart throbbed with passion and desire . . . did not every kiss send the blood wildly in a flow of joy though her veins, making her feel that she could die willingly in his embrace? This is love, this is passion—not the cold, calm sentiment, a combination of reason and custom, which an English girl so often thinks the only necessary accompaniment to marriage. (CC i. 84)

Indeed, romance novels of the period are characterized by scenes of passionate kissing. Barbara’s first kiss (on her forehead) in Amelia B. Edwards’s Barbara’s History is epiphanic: ‘A whole world of feeling had been revealed to me . . . I had passed in a few hours from childhood to womanhood . . .’ (Barbara’s History, ii. 143). Embraces often, it seems, effect the passage to new maturity: when Susan Fielding kisses for the first time, we learn that it ‘opened the first rosecoloured page of her life as a woman’ (SF iii. 196). Violet’s love for Ambrose Hampden in Emma Marshall’s Violet Douglas (1868) similarly takes her beyond ‘the point where she had seemed to stand for so long—longer than most girls, perhaps—“with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet”’ (Violet Douglas, 253).67 Obviously, these texts still focus on a relationship with a man as a means of achieving ‘awakening’. Nevertheless, by locating sexual and emotional arousal outside marriage, the novels insist on a disparity between emotionally and socially legitimated maturity: romance, not marriage, forms the site for emotional development, and passion facilitates maturity. Indeed, as if to stress the difference between social and psychological maturity, some heroines become sexually and emotionally aroused after their marriages—and by someone other than their husbands. Phemie Keller gradually falls in love with her husband’s heir, Basil Stondon: while initially she is unaware of her own feelings, she 67 Emma Marshall, Violet Douglas (London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1868). ‘Maidenhood’ appears frequently in this decade. In Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes, one character remarks of Alice/Annis: ‘ “I have seen her grow in beauty, and in a better grace than beauty . . . until now, “Standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet, womanhood and childhood sweet” ’ (AWF ii. 231–2). Nelly Le Strange considers that she ‘crossed the brook between “womanhood and childhood fleet” ’ on the day of her first dinner-party (Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower, 16).

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is eventually ‘wakened from her slumber’ by the force of their mutual emotion (PK ii. 77), which finally awakens both her character and her body. Gertrude too experiences extra-marital passion, and the experience is again portrayed as a feeling of both physical and emotional arousal: her love for Sir Ronald is portrayed as ‘the first awakening from the torpor of her virgin soul. Though married, she had never known one thrill of passion, one thought of love—she was as unconscious, dreaming as a child; but now womanhood and knowledge had come together . . .’ (CC ii. 306). The novels discussed so far associate growth with romance and sexual passion. Another common 1860s plot locates growth in the decision not to get married. Indeed, a young woman’s decision to remain single surfaces as an apt conclusion in fiction by both men and women of the period, as we shall see: Trollope’s The Small House at Allington is one of a number of novels that enable the equation of singleness with maturity and, furthermore, that develop this tacit cultural criticism by engaging with the terms in which relationships between men and women are presently couched. Lily Dale, the novel’s 17-year-old heroine, expresses her ardour for Adolphus Crosbie openly after their engagement: ‘She had an idea of her own, that . . . a girl should never show any preference for a man’ until they are essentially engaged, but that after this she should ‘make no drawback on her love, but pour it forth for his benefit with all her strength’ (The Small House at Allington, 74).68 Crosbie, however, wants her to disguise her emotion, to affect ‘more reticence,—[be] more secret, as it were, as to her feelings’ so that the world should not know of the engagement (SHA 92); the reader, realizing that Lily’s passion is a mark of her authenticity, is not surprised to find Crosbie treated with scorn by the author and suitably punished by a disastrously unhappy marriage. Crosbie’s engagement to Lily was motivated by love (at least on her side); his relationship with the irritating Lady Alexandrina is activated merely by his desire for increased wealth and social standing. The contrast Trollope employs in The Small House at Allington— between a girl’s authentic, open desire and a man’s weaker, more shallow and more status-conscious affection—is key to many women’s novels of the 1860s. Having validated girls’ passions, various fictions suggest that the recipients of their desire may be 68 Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington (1864; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), hereafter referenced parenthetically as SHA.

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unworthy. Novels are filled with lovers who doubt the affection and integrity of their virtuous fiancées: Dick M’Gregor in Cometh Up as a Flower is persuaded (by the incorrigible Dolly) to believe that Nell wants to marry the bovine but wealthy Sir Hugh, and Sir Henry Harcourt in Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter doubts Magdalen Fortescue when he realizes there is a secret in her past (as we have seen).69 Engagement becomes less a period of romance and mutual commitment and more an unstable agreement that both parties treat differently. While the heroines see it as facilitating the free expression of their desire, their lovers regard it as a contract and thus something that can be redefined or even broken. In other words, the language of the market-place and subsequently its values infiltrate the domain of romance once engagement and marriage are on the cards. This is particularly apparent in The Small House at Allington: Crosbie extricates himself from his engagement to Lily by surrounding their relationship with vague half-facts, acting like a politician rather than a lover. He implies to Lady Alexandrina ‘that nothing at this moment was absolutely fixed’, and his sense of the situation as a tricky legal position comes through in his self-satisfied musings: ‘He had succeeded in baffling the charge made against him, without saying anything as to which his conscience need condemn him. So, at least, he told himself’ (SHA 189). This desire to expose the sexes’ different responses (or potential responses) to romance relates Trollope’s text to a host of contemporary novels. Eliot’s Stephen Guest similarly tries to evade his relationship to Lucy by arguing that ‘“I am breaking no positive engagement . . .”’ (MF 449). Thomas’s Only Herself develops the critique of men’s disingenuous rhetoric in more detail and with overt polemic: Dora Jocelyn (one of two heroines in the novel) may not have the author’s support as a character, but the text is scathing about the way her selfimportant beau ‘could not abstain from giving utterance to the halfhints and protestations with which men do at such times conceive they have a right to perplex and bewilder a girl’ (OH i. 216). Thus, while Dora’s self-interest is generally critiqued in the narrative (Dora thinks of ‘Only Herself’), her precipitate announcement of an engagement with Mr Falconer in the first volume earns the narrator’s qualified support: ‘if [his words] were capable of another interpretation, if . . . she had ascribed to them a meaning which they did not 69 Philip Ormond, Maud Carleton’s lover, also doubts his mysteriously absent fiancée.

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possess, more shame to him for rendering them so ambiguous, and no shame to her for the error that was more of the heart than the head!’ (OH i. 242). The displacement of marriage from the end of the novel (and thus the frustration of a reader’s generic expectations about the appropriate conclusion for such narratives) takes on a particular significance in this context of a chorus of criticism of modern marriages, a criticism that stresses the degree to which young women were disadvantaged in the arena of human relationships. Concern with the plight of the fallen woman in the 1850s only heightened in the 1860s; the Contagious Diseases Act, its amendments, and the ensuing Campaign for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts kept the issue constantly in the public consciousness. While few 1860s women’s novels (certainly none that I have found) expressly suggest that men have been sexually active before their engagements, it seems plausible that the insistent rhetoric of sale, barter, and the market-place, associated with men and their relationships with girls, suggests the fear of men as the clients, the careless purchasers, of fallen women. Having stressed that marriage is a dangerous venture, novels subsequently emphasize that no girl should enter into the commitment if she doubts her lover’s integrity. Annie Thomas extends her criticism of men’s approaches to marriage and courtship through an analysis of Dora’s half-sister’s engagement. Helen Jocelyn is supremely unselfish and honest: when Dora comes to her, in serious trouble because she has written letters to another man, Helen courageously goes to visit him in his bachelor’s apartment and persuades him to give the letters back. However, Digby Burnington (her lover since childhood) misinterprets her secretive behaviour, and comes to question her honour. Helen rejects the repentant Digby once she realizes his perfidy: his ability to misconstrue innocent behaviour, she feels, reveals serious character deficiencies. She achieves greater understanding not only of Digby but of herself in the process: ‘She loved him still, but the scales had dropped from her eyes about him. She knew herself stronger than he was—stronger and more stable, and so more to be relied upon even by herself in any judgment that she formed’ (OH iii. 242). Helen’s decision to reject Digby and embrace the single life rearticulates Lily Dale’s resolution in The Small House at Allington; Lily, like Helen, attains inner strength, a more developed sense of the ‘realities of the world’ and a new sense of her adult identity once she

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has come to terms with her lover’s betrayal. Refusing the kind of ‘prolonged childhood’ experienced by Rachel Curtis or the filial submissiveness of Susan Graham, she constructs her adult self by defining her position as an adult daughter. ‘“I mean to have a will of my own, too, mamma; and a way also, it if be possible,”’ she informs her mother: ‘“When Bell is married I shall consider it a partnership, and I shan’t do what I’m told any longer”; “For a year or two longer, till Bell is gone, I mean to be dutiful; but it would be very stupid for a girl to be dutiful all her life”’ (SHA 333). Lily has been criticized for her ‘masochistic’ determination to remain single: ‘Lily’s own view may seem so outrageously arbitrary that we often want to shake her. The temptation to attack her is almost irresistible . . . There is no easy explanation for Lily’s state in psychological terms’ argues James Kincaid, rather too vehemently.70 Yet when set against the backdrop of contemporary popular fiction, Lily’s decision to remain single emerges not as an act of wilful masochism, but rather as enabled by a larger, commonly acknowledged maturational process. Lily can construct herself as an adult daughter because she has passed through two important developmental stages: she has both experienced physical passion (for Adolphus) and gained ‘adult’ knowledge of the world through disillusionment. Helen and Lily subsequently choose neither marriage, nor eternally dependent girlhood, but rather an adult identity sans husband. This is perhaps the ultimate rejection of the equation of maturity with marriage: heroines do not only decline nuptials, they develop self-determination precisely by doing so. While the narratives considered here range in their political standpoints, few are overtly critical of the status quo—except occasionally in speeches such as this one, spoken by the antiheroine of Susan Fielding: Susan, has it never occurred to you what a shocking injustice it is to be born a woman? By no fault of one’s own to be cramped and whaleboned—I don’t mean physically—taught nothing worth knowing, although one’s capacities are as good as a man’s—given nothing to do, although one’s desire for action is as strong as a man’s, and then told to be contented! When I was a small child I remember getting hold of an unfortunate bird once . . . fitted it up an old cage of Aunt Jem’s, with the tables and chairs out of my doll’s house; gave him water, food, a looking-glass even; and arranged fresh leaves and flowers over his head. The poor wretch beat his breast passionately for four-and-twenty hours against the bars, then died, happily for himself! (SF i. 283–4) 70

James R. Kincaid, Introduction, SHA, p. xv.

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Associating such social criticism with the difficult and often unpleasant Portia, Edwardes seems to support the docility and submissiveness of Susan, a girl who is happy to confine her wing-span to the cage of which Portia speaks. Yet a wide range of 1860s novels do, in fact, initiate a liberation from ‘the doll’s house’, stressing that marriage based on anything but love is enervating and that the choice to remain single can be empowering. The romance reader of the 1860s could not expect to find marriage crowned as the apex of a young woman’s desires; associated with worldly goods and prosperity, marriage was conceived of in many romances as a social contract, extraneous (perhaps even orthogonal) to a young woman’s psychological growth. Portia’s radical polemic continues: ‘“Two months of courtship, say, a fortnight’s honeymoon, six weeks of waning adoration, and then a kind of pitying friendly toleration, if she is very lucky, till the curtain falls . . . How, with all the wire-drawing in the world, can it be made to spread over all five mortal acts of an ordinary woman’s life?”’ (SF i. 286). Portia’s account of the trajectory of a woman’s life appears in markedly similar terms in Mrs Grey’s Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady. Lady Millicent also describes her life as a drama, emphasizing that marriage ends the play: ‘“I have already passed through several acts of my drama,—childhood, girlhood, and soon the curtain will draw up, and the last act will commence,— I shall be a married woman . . .”’ (Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady, i. 291). Yet the novels examined here complicate such progressions by reversing the order of the acts: marriage does not necessarily close the drama; ‘the romance of life’ is not confined to the middle of the play. By positively avoiding traditional narrative forms (in which the heroine’s experience is traced from girlhood to marriage), these novels avoid channelling the heroine towards an orthodox adulthood; indeed, writers perhaps avoided the Bildungsroman paradigm precisely to sidestep the trajectory girlhood– courtship–marriage. Novels of sudden development and equally sudden checks, of dislocated emotional and social maturity, of unfixed, uncertain adult selfhood, even of a return to adolescence or childhood, represent the acquisition of an adult identity for women in the mid-Victorian period as a fluctuating, complicated, and highly unpredictable affair.

3

The Transitional Stage Theatrical Girlhood in 1870s Fiction introduction For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r Being once display’d doth fall that very hour.1

Exhibition has long been presented as a dangerous, if inevitable, impulse in the transition to womanhood. Viola, agreeing with Orsino, laments: ‘And so they are; alas, that they are so! | To die, even when they to perfection grow!’2 A number of women’s popular fictions in the 1870s emphasized that exposure and exhibition attend the transition to womanhood. Holme Lee’s The Beautiful Miss Barrington (1871), a novel describing the travails of 18-year-old Felicia Bethel, is a case in point: the narrator portrays Felicia’s feelings for a childhood friend on the eve of ‘coming out’ as ‘a pretty overture before the curtain drew up, and the lights were turned full upon the stage’ (The Beautiful Miss Barrington, i. 95).3 This theatrical metaphor partly evokes the new visibility of a young girl who emerged from the schoolroom to take her place in the more public drawing- and ballroom. This period in her life was also associated with a change in dress and hairstyle, maybe even the use of make-up, as she took on her new social role. Such basic facts in the lives of middle-class girls in their mid to late teens, with their resonance of theatrical exhibition and transformation, brought anxieties concerning female participation in the public sphere and woman’s metamorphic potential to the fore. While the quotation from Twelfth Night suggests the longstanding nature of such fears, they found a new expression in an 1

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ii. iv. 37–8. Ibid. ii. iv. 39–40. 3 ‘Holme Lee’ (Harriet Parr), The Beautiful Miss Barrington, 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1871), hereafter referenced parenthetically as BMB. 2

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1870s context. Felicia’s Uncle Ralph picks up the resonance of the theatrical in his niece’s coming out and reorients the axiom when he enquires, derisively, ‘“how long will it be before your country-roses are fallen?”’ (BMB, i. 122).4 Readings of the transition to womanhood as a stage of performativity and theatricality typically draw on (what Jonas Barish has called) an ‘antitheatrical prejudice’. The theatre and the actor were traditionally regarded as dangerous entities in nineteenth-century culture, as deceitful, showy, and artificial. Jane Austen’s Fanny Price famously demonstrated her purity and unwillingness to dissimulate by opting out of the Bertrams’ private theatricals in Mansfield Park (1814); Elizabeth Sewell’s Susan Graham is similarly marked as an unusually virtuous heroine when she refuses to participate in the tableaux at Ivors. In Annie Edwardes’s The Morals of Mayfair, Fridoline, the novel’s indigent but worthy second heroine, is at pains to distance herself from her profession: Mine is the lowest art of all. I doubt if the first actor who ever lived, really ennobled human nature, or raised one fallen spirit through his genius. Everything about the stage is so false; the light and the paint, and the actors themselves, who are scarcely off the scene before they sink down again from the noblest character into their own debased lives . . . I never seem to breathe after rehearsal or performance, till I feel myself again in the fresh air of the country. (MM i. 192–3)

Nina Auerbach argues in Private Theatricals that this kind of intense antitheatrical feeling was engendered by the Victorian fear of 4 The use of theatrical metaphors in descriptions of coming out also indicates an awareness, I think, that the process constituted a ritualistic means of mapping a particular contemporary construction of gender on to the female body. The practice (like all gender rituals) presented itself as authentic, as expressing and uncovering the real truth of womanhood, but its very existence reveals the artificiality of the feminine identity it seeks to propagate; after all, why would you need to transform girls into what they naturally, essentially, are? My conclusions here are, of course, indebted to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a text that highlights the ways in which gender identities are enacted on the surface of the body and also ‘displaced’ into the core, the psyche. ‘Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow’, Butler argues; ‘rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts’ (emphasis in original). The Victorian ritual of ‘coming out’ can be seen as an act of ‘stylized repetition’—and while I shall discuss in this chapter and Chapter 4 the ways in which women writers laid bare the inauthenticity of the structure and the model of femininity it sought to perpetuate, it is worth noting that discomfort with the model— evidenced by the negative use of theatrical metaphors—was widespread. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 140.

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inauthenticity. Drawing on Barish’s conclusions, she argues that the actor (who, of course, pretends to be someone else) can be seen as gripped by an almost ‘demonic possession’, aligned with ‘the forces that destroy that center of natural and cultural coherence, the own self’.5 Acting consequently becomes ‘the ultimate, deceitful mobility’, she argues: ‘It connotes not only lies, but a fluidity of character that decomposes the uniform integrity of the self.’6 Acting unsettles because it demonstrates an ability to deceive and falsify, to pretend to feel. In The Half Sisters (1848), Geraldine Jewsbury’s hero denigrates the actress for just this reason: female performers ‘“do not believe what they profess to set forth,”’ he notes; ‘“they do it for a piece of silver and a morsel of bread, and get out of it as soon as they can”’ (Half Sisters, 215).7 The actress’s subversive behaviour suggested all women’s potential for treacherous dissimulation, as Lynn M. Voskuil has argued: Precisely because actresses act—because, ostensibly unlike housewives, they pretend and display themselves in public—the promise of nature could, for many observers, be transformed into the threat of artifice . . . theatrical models helped constitute mid-Victorian conceptions of female inauthenticity beyond the actual stage . . .8

Girls in the transition to womanhood were particularly likely to provoke comparisons with the actress: commentators often uneasily associated the process of appearing in public social arenas (drawingrooms, ballrooms, and dining-rooms) and revealing accomplishments (dancing, singing, and piano-playing) with acting, and they drew on the era’s antitheatrical terms to characterize the experience. In The Beautiful Miss Barrington, for example, Uncle Ralph belligerently describes Felicia’s piano-playing as sham and stagey: ‘“here 5 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 76; qtd. in Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 12. 6 Auerbach, Private Theatricals, 4. 7 Geraldine E. Jewsbury, The Half Sisters (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), hereafter referenced parenthetically as HS. Tracy C. Davis examines the stereotypical association of actress and prostitute in Victorian culture in Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). She concludes that there is little evidence of overlap between the professions. For further discussion on the actress’s social position see Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) esp. 112–13. 8 Lynn M. Voskuil, ‘Acting Naturally: Brontë, Lewes and the Problem of Gender Performance’, ELH 62 (1995), 409–42; 417.

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is our pretty painted innocence, practising her new version of an old song . . . Now she has put on her modesty.”’ As the narrator interjects, ‘Blushing he calls paint’ (BMB, i. 159): antitheatrical and antifeminist, Uncle Ralph portrays Felicia as an actress who pretends emotion and innocence. For Ralph the ‘promise of nature’ embodied in childhood has been ‘transformed into the threat of artifice’ by the public performance that ‘coming out’ entails. However, the impulse to act and perform was not always approached with fear in Victorian discourse: indeed, as we shall see, theatricality was reconceived in the later nineteenth century in ways that rendered positive representations of even youthful female performance possible. Critics such as G. H. Lewes challenged the equation of theatricality with inauthenticity; Voskuil points out that Lewes viewed the stage as an ideal world, contrasted with the mundane, even unpleasant, realities of everyday life. Acting, Lewes felt, had the potential to edify, the ‘capacity to reach and train the emotions of the audience’. Lewes also distinguished between the ‘stagey’ and the ‘natural’ actor: while the former accepted and used theatrical conventions, acting self-consciously, the latter aimed for a performance in which her or his separate self became invisible. ‘[A] natural actor strives for a seamless impersonation that obscures the line between his own personality and the character he represents’, Voskuil summarizes.9 Theatricality thus becomes a far more nuanced concept, no longer something intrinsically and essentially sham. Great performers are ‘natural actors’ and supremely self-abnegating characters; only bad performers draw attention to themselves and the theatre’s apparatus. Lewes’s characterization of ‘good’ theatrical performance as selfless and authentic was developed and expanded over the next few decades. Theatre criticism from the last quarter of the century iterated and reiterated the importance of hard work—and thus more and greater self-sacrifice—in acting.10 In an article on ‘Acting, Natural and Acquired’ in Temple Bar, for example, the essayist inveighs against those who believe that, ‘because some capability for acting is a natural and common gift’, all spectators of the stage could 9

Ibid. 411, 413. Numerous articles from the period emphasize the hard work and dedication necessary for successful acting, and praise modern actors for their commitment. See, for example, ‘The Theatres’, Temple Bar, 39 (1873), 547–52 and Rev. Robert B. Drummond, ‘The Theatre, its Bearings on Morals and Religion’, Victoria, 25 (1875), 739–44. 10

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be actors if they desired.11 Think of Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth, the writer advises: The smile which played on Klesmer’s face, while Gwendolen was acting her Medea, was the smile of the artist at the inexperienced efforts of an amateur. Acting is an art; and natural gifts must be subjected in it, as in the other arts, to the regulations of law and style, before perfection can be attained.12

The emphasis on training outlined here moves on from Lewes’s focus on the moment of performance, concentrating on the process by which an actor achieves distinction. The natural self must be honed, we learn; the individual must subject him or herself to ‘the regulations of law and style’. Actors who subsequently achieve ‘an easy naturalness, as opposed to artificial mouthing’ not only rid their performance of the appearance of performance, but also reveal their commitment and their labour as well as their ‘power of selfannihilation’ in the service of art.13 The reconception of acting as a form of self-abnegation rendered theatrical performance curiously available to women in the later years of the century, in middle-class women’s fiction at least. Indeed, the theatrical women’s novel—a distinctive, and rarely examined, subgenre of the women’s novel—typically centred on sympathetic girl-actresses with whom the reader was clearly expected to identify. Authors such as Bertha Buxton, Edith Stewart Drewry, Florence Marryat, and Matilda Betham-Edwards suggested that the acting profession positively cultivated culturally orthodox feminine virtues, such as self-renunciation. Yet, at the same time, texts also argued that the theatre offered young women challenging opportunities for public action and self-expression, behaviour hardly consistent with traditional ideals of feminine conduct. Actress-heroines in theatrical women’s texts therefore constitute intriguing role models for young women, models founded upon an ambitious attempt to reconcile traditional and modern visions of girlhood. Drawing on the broader cultural reconception of the theatre as a socially purifying arena, writers depict those girls who perform on the stage as both the bulwarks of the nation’s morality and as energetic, articulate, and self-confident actors. Indeed, in theatrical women’s fiction, the transi11

E. T. Cooke, ‘Acting, Natural and Acquired’, Temple Bar, 59 (1880), 400–3;

400. 12 13

Ibid. 401. Ibid. 401, 402.

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tional phase is represented not as a leisured phase between childhood and womanhood, but rather as a time of active apprenticeship and public performance.

the natural actress Bertha Buxton’s Nell—On and Off the Stage (1879) contrasts the lives of two girls, Nell Trevor, an impoverished actress, and Rosamund Dalrymple, a young lady of birth and breeding. Like many another Victorian women’s novel, the text opens with a heroine’s eighteenth birthday; as usual, the protagonist is represented yearning for a wider sphere of action.14 Nell’s dreams, however, are actually to be fulfilled: she is literally about to enter the public Sphere (by making her debut at a theatre named ‘The Sphere’). ‘“And what is this I hear about your coming out at the Sphere . . ?” ’ she is asked by another actress; the constant references to her ‘début’, her ‘come out’, and to Nell herself as a ‘pretty young débutante’ reinforce our awareness of the parallels between theatrical and social experiences (Nell—On and Off the Stage, i. 34, 23, 144).15 Buxton’s text contrasts the two different theatrical debuts experienced by Rosamund and Nell: Rosamund, bored at home, toys with private theatricals. Buxton does not specifically refer to Rosamund’s society debut, yet the narrative does stress the contrasting moral imperatives embedded in the opportunities available to working- and middle-class girls. Nell cheerfully compares her life with Rosamund’s, stressing that her existence will be far more satisfying and valuable: ‘I am just three months older than Miss Dalrymple; it’s only fair I should have made my début first, isn’t it, mum dear?’ 14 Women’s novels that open with the heroine’s birthday include Mrs Gore, Progress and Prejudice (1854); Mrs G. S. Reaney, Waking and Working; Or from Girlhood to Womanhood (1874); Rosa Nouchette Carey, Mary St John (1882); Caroline Austin, Marie’s Home: Or, a Glimpse of Home Life (1885); Emma Leslie, Hidden Seed; or, a Year in a Girl’s Life (1886); Bithia Mary Croker, Diana Barrington (1888), and Emily Cameron, A Daughter’s Heart (1892). 15 Bertha H. Buxton, Nell—On and Off the Stage, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1879), hereafter referenced parenthetically as Nell. The terms applied to Nell were commonly used in accounts of a heroine’s entrance into society, of course. In Mrs Day’s 1873 novel From Birth to Bridal, for example, Vera Harrison’s coming out is described as her ‘début’. Vera herself is termed a ‘débutante’ when she first ‘[appears] in public’. Mrs Day, From Birth to Bridal (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1873), ii. 5, 89.

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‘Ah, my poor child,’ sighed Mrs Hall, ‘a very different sort of début will that of Miss Dalrymple be from yours tonight.’ ‘Different, indeed!’ cried Nell, with exaltation. ‘To her it will all be idle pastime, and to me it is the first earnest of a career of work and possible distinction . . . I would not change my fate for hers if such a chance were offered me to-morrow!’ (Nell, ii. 42)

Nell’s notion of acting as ‘a career of work and possible distinction’ is a far cry from Fridoline’s view of the theatrical profession as ‘the lowest art of all’: Nell recognizes the ‘distinction’ of life in the service of Art. Rosamund’s more conventional social existence is flagged from the early stages of the novel as a life of ‘idle pastimes’—a frivolous life of self-pleasuring rather than self-sacrifice. Nell needs to act, in every sense of the phrase. Indeed, this is common in representations of the young actress in theatrical women’s fiction: actress-heroines are typically motivated in the first place by financial exigency and in the second place by their passionate commitment to, and inherent love of, the profession. For example, 16year-old Betha Durant, heroine of Florence Marryat’s My Sister the Actress (1881), is forced into acting when her bullying father casts her from his doors: she soon discovers, however, that ‘The love of histrionic display is inherent in her: it has lain dormant, hitherto . . . but it is her second nature, and her present indulgence proves to be like the first drop of blood to the tiger’ (My Sister the Actress, i. 174–5).16 Financial need helps legitimize the young actress’s choice, but the novels amplify their defence of the profession by emphasizing that the disposition to perform is inborn and irrefutable. Thus Nell is seen to act unconsciously early on in the novel, when her body ‘performs’ her inner emotions: on her eighteenth birthday, when told she may become an actress, ‘Her eyes danced, and her feet kept audible measure, too, to the glad tune of her rejoicing’ (Nell, i. 21). This conception of the desire to act as intrinsic within some individuals is also apparent in Betham-Edwards’s Bridget (1877), whose heroine too has ‘music in every movement’. Betham-Edwards is at pains to stress that the desire to act may be the result of a girl’s unusually ‘natural’ upbringing: like Buxton, she contrasts a theatrical life with a social existence, defining the former as an authentic expression of an inner need and the latter as the sphere of true artifice. Thus the full passage reads: ‘There was grace in every limb, music in every movement, the 16 Florence Marryat, My Sister the Actress, 3 vols. (London: F. V. White, 1881), hereafter referenced parenthetically as My Sister.

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grace engendered of a rare physical development, undeteriorated by fashionable dress or artificial habits of life’ (Bridget, ii. 180).17 The ‘idle’ life led by Rosamund in Nell—On and Off the Stage is shown to be particularly dangerous during late girlhood. The General, Rosamund’s uncle, has kept her in ‘seclusion, far from the roughly polluting breath of worldly society’, yet there is little that is ‘natural’ about this rural life: bored, Rosamund turns every interaction into a drama, and soon finds a leading man to star in an exciting and dangerous new play (Nell, ii. 15). Rosamund is the less sympathetic character, who crucially does not realize the labour, self-abnegation, and motivation necessary for great acting; however, the reason given for her pleasure-seeking approach to life is only a starker rendition of Nell’s incentive to act: ‘She panted for freedom for life. The humdrum existence with her mother at Silverbeach had become insupportable’ (Nell, iii. 76). When she does finally encounter some limited society she goes astray, falling in love with the deceitful Jack, an actor, and running away from home.18 Yet it is not her urgent desire ‘for freedom for life’ that the novel criticizes; Buxton rather emphasizes Rosamund’s moral weakness, her inability to withstand temptation. This, it seems, arises from her futile and sequestered life: Rosamund’s ‘lovable nature’ has been spoiled by ‘Flattery and prosperity’ (Nell, ii. 86). As we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2, Victorian women’s novels usually celebrated rural life; the General’s effort to shield Rosamund from corruption echoes the words of fathers in novels such as Sylvan Holt’s Daughter. Yet Buxton clearly intends the passage ironically, and seems to be satirizing her predecessors’ nostalgic Romanticism; the countryside is not a realm of authentic action in her novel, nor is it a place of freedom. At the same time, Buxton does maintain the sense of an authentic sphere, sharply contrasted with the frivolous social world: her representation of the theatre owes much to depictions of the sylvan countryside in earlier women’s fictions. Buxton underscores the importance of purpose in life and personal self-regulation for young women through a third character, actress Edith Eliot: while Edith is, in looks, ‘like—yes, very like—Rosamund 17 Matilda Betham-Edwards, Bridget, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1877). Jewsbury uses similar terms in her account of Bianca’s upbringing: the girl ‘had been left to nature and chance, and nobody had ever taught her propriety’ (HS 160). 18 Like G. H. Lewes, Buxton does not dispense with the notion of the stagey, deceitful performer, but rather supplements it with a new ideal of the natural, authentic actor.

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Dalrymple’, her life is entirely motivated by a desire to ‘elevate the moral tone of the stage by the example of her own pure and simple life; to prove to what perfection art may be brought by unflagging patience and undaunted perseverance . . .’ Edith’s commitment, diligence, and desire to edify throw Rosamund’s idleness yet further into relief—and also sanctify a woman’s ambition for purpose in life: ‘“Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds”’, Edith insists (Nell, ii. 219; iii. 4; iii. 12–13). For theatrical women’s novels consistently stress not only that the desire to act is authentic, but also that modern young women need a wider sphere of action, involving employment, artistic fulfilment, and social purpose. This moderately progressive approach coexists with a more traditional idealization of feminine docility and domesticity. Thus, for example, while Betham-Edwards on the one hand highlights her heroine’s quasi-maternal commitment to her orphaned younger brother (‘“Oh! to be rich and to have Hilary with me always,” she thought . . . Her wildest dream was bounded within these limits’ (Bridget, ii. 227)), on the other she stresses the girl’s need for freedom, for physical and psychological emancipation: Bridget had hitherto suffered from want of breathing room, spiritually and physically. She had been cramped, cooped up, hedged in, body and mind, fitted to a Procrustean-like bed, as many another woman to a place too small for alike her powers and her will. (Bridget, ii. 277–8)

Betham-Edwards finally constructs a conventional womanhood for her titular heroine: Bridget never actually takes up the profession, marrying her mentor instead.19 At the same time, the narrator’s early support for more ‘breathing room’ for women is reinforced through discussions of the novel’s second heroine, Helwyse. Helwyse is an artist, who (like Edith Eliot) is motivated by her dedication to art. She is an incarnation of the ideal artistic woman: whilst a true woman, ready to sacrifice everything if necessary to womanly duty, [she] had as strong a determination as Kingsbury [her admirer, and a fellow artist] himself to realise those higher aspirations with which sex has nothing to do. She was just as capable as he of persistent self-forgetting, self19 Bridget’s mentor, M. Papillon, is the voice of tradition in the novel. Ultimately, he regrets inspiring the girl to act: ‘Why could she not make up her mind to accept an ordinary lot—namely, love, marriage, and domestic happiness? Were not these better than any amount of brilliant successes, feverish triumphs, flatteries, and lip-homage?’ (Bridget, iii. 114–15). As indicated in the body of my text, this attitude coexists with a more positive approach to women’s occupation of the public sphere.

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confident devotion to art, and just as sure that, by dint of learning, toil, and thought, she should arrive at artistic completeness some day. (Bridget, ii. 154–5)

The desire for liberty and the sense of ambition are explicitly described as sexless—as something that both young men and women will experience, but that only men have traditionally been able to articulate and satisfy. However, Betham-Edwards subtly suggests that women are particularly qualified for artistic success: since ‘true’ women are ‘ready to sacrifice everything if necessary to womanly duty’, they are constitutionally prone to the kind of ‘self-forgetting’ necessary for greatness in Art. Theatrical novels typically represent authentic girls choosing an artistic career whilst shallow young women accept a more conventional social existence. Society girls—like Buxton’s Rosamund—are derided as the real source of moral contagion in contemporary Britain. The portrait of the society girl as morally bankrupt was not, of course, in any sense new or original: Linton’s characterization of the ‘girl of the period’ as ‘a creature who dies her hair and paints her face . . . and whose dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect as she possesses’ articulates precisely this idea. Gail Marshall reads Linton’s splutter as a text that reveals the deep anger Victorian commentators could feel for those perceived to resist a submissive role: The girl is . . . seen to be graphically claiming the right to be her own Pygmalion, literally to shape and colour herself as Pygmalion . . . would have done his statue. At the root of Lynn Linton’s accusation, and indeed of her whole argument, is the charge that the young woman is seeking to be selfmade, to remake herself according to her own desires and observations, that is, to override the Pygmalion-like rights of men.20

Marshall argues that the Galatea/Pygmalion myth invariably underpins Victorian representations of the actress; she contends that actresses were typically depicted as compliant models whose performances were crafted by a great man (a director, for instance). Selfdirected young women—whether actual actresses or not—could expect to draw Lintonesque invective. And yet the theatrical novels 20 Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Female Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26. Marshall engages with critics like Tracy Davis who have argued that ‘the gorgeous actresses overturn the hegemony of false feminine propriety’ (qtd. in ibid. 97).

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discussed here do not reserve the acts of creation for men alone: in fact, positive treatments of women actresses as ‘self-makers’ abound. Betham-Edwards, for instance, depicts Bridget acting in the absence of a director during the early stages of her training; Bridget’s performance is thus explicitly self-fashioned: ‘Hers was indeed a glorious impersonation, and alike pose, attitude, and expression were of her own choosing. No one had said to her, you must try to look thus, hold your arms that way, kneel thus—she had thought of everything herself . . .’ (Bridget, i. 181–2). The terms of Betham-Edwards’s description are interesting: she does not shy away from the fictionality of the scene, celebrating it instead as a ‘glorious impersonation’. But then, all sense of mediation between the acting individual and the performance is gone; actress and role are bound tightly together in (what Voskuil called) a ‘seamless impersonation that obscures the line between [her] own personality and the character [she] represents’. Bridget has truly become that apparent anomaly, the ‘natural actress’. In a suggestively similar scene, Buxton’s heroine self-directs while watching herself in a mirror. After her first, rather traumatic experience of acting in public, Nell decides to try acting in private ‘without the drawback of self-constituted critics’. Her very limited experience had never before brought her face to face with a long glass, and she could not but consider herself a very presentable person as she beheld this pleasing reflection. What a good place it would be to practise that little scene of hers, here, now . . . She could now judge for herself of the effect of her movements, both forward and backward. She could tell to what angle her arms should be raised, and how the salver might be lifted gracefully. She made some preliminary experiments, sternly criticised her efforts, declared them abortive, and tried to improve. Chance had led her—a novice—to the glass before which the most experienced actress spends so many anxious hours, studying each look, each movement, with the utmost care and attention, before she appears on the stage in a part which the audience specially commend as perfect—because the varying expression, the easy pose, are all so natural, so graceful, so unstudied. (Nell, i. 113–15)

In this scene, Nell moves swiftly from self-consciousness (the awareness of her own looks, her sense of herself as ‘a very presentable person’) to a recognition of the importance of steady rehearsal and

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finally, at the close of the scene, to complete forgetfulness of self: lost in her performance, she is startled when a door opens suddenly behind her.21 This progression also tracks an important shift in the use of the mirror: at the beginning of the scene Nell uses it quite conventionally to evaluate her ‘feminine’ self (she notes, ‘with special satisfaction, that the girl, though not tall, was slim and shapely, and that her simple black gown fitted her to perfection’); towards the end it has become a tool of the trade (Nell, i. 112). Nell is learning to achieve ‘an easy naturalness, as opposed to artificial mouthing’ through the combined forces of self-annihilation and self-discipline.22 These heroines do not conform to Marshall’s Galatea/Pygmalion paradigm, then; instead, like ‘the girl of the period’, each is able to ‘remake herself according to her own desires and observations, that is, to override the Pygmalion-like rights of men’. The political and ideological radicalism of those ‘desires and observations’ is, in an obvious sense, limited: heroines do not go on to muse on the constraints experienced by women in society, or explicitly to dissect social conceptions of women’s ‘nature’. Indeed, the novels consistently maintain essentialist notions of women as ideally purifying beings. Yet the texts’ resolute maintenance of such conceptions in a theatrical setting directs a body-blow to the idea that theatrical acting, for women, initiates the loss of ‘the promise of nature’ through ‘the threat of artifice’. Drawing from contemporary critical debates about natural acting in the theatrical profession, the novels call into question the notion of what it means for a woman to act naturally, and they appear to conclude—surprisingly, perhaps—that selfdirected action is most conducive to authentic female performance. For the heroines’ most ‘natural’ theatrical scenes are clearly those that occur in the absence of men, when girls delight in acting for themselves. Their own inclinations guide them to achieve a performance that is disciplined, artless, sincere; a performance that, moreover, expresses an incipient need for action, ‘for freedom for life’. 21 ‘She stepped leisurely before the glass, extended her hands on which the (imaginary) salver rested, presented it to a visionary Mrs d’Almayne, and was about to move back without turning round, when the sudden opening of the door behind her compelled her to do so. She flushed hotly . . .’ (Nell, i. 115). 22 Edith Stewart Drewry’s heroine, Margherita, is also admired for her work ethic and rigorous self-discipline: ‘The girl was an indefatigable worker, and genius was so true and loyal that she was never fully satisfied with herself, and eagerly sought the severest criticism from the few on whose judgment she could rely . . .’ (Only An Actress, 3 vols. (London: F. V. White, 1883), ii. 189).

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Just as actor and role should fuse in one ‘seamless impersonation’, so the heroine’s body and spirit become melded, the desire to act naturally fulfilled in the moment of performance. Male efforts to craft women’s acting seem correspondingly intrusive, invasive, at odds with the insurgent (and thus ‘natural’) demands of the female inner life; inauthentic performance is the result. Indeed female characters, rather than ceding control to male directors, appear to be stepping into men’s shoes in the most literal sense: Margherita, protagonist of Edith Stewart Drewry’s Only an Actress (1883), tells her new theatre-manager that ‘“She had mostly played boys’ parts . . . and did not care which rôle she took, masculine or feminine”’ (Only an Actress, i. 127). Pygmalion, it seems, is becoming redundant.23 Buxton allows us to suspect that her heroine enjoys the freedoms of the stage through girlhood and into womanhood, although she refuses to tell us the particulars of Nell’s existence beyond the action of the text. It seems likely that the girl will marry her lover, Edith Eliot’s brother, although we are simply told in ‘L’Envoi’ that ‘Nell herself is happy, prosperous, successful now’ (Nell, iii. 218). The reference to ‘success’ appears to indicate that Nell continues in her profession after marriage; Edith’s brother has, after all, supported Edith’s vocation. Yet the author’s unwillingness actually to represent the protagonist’s union unsettles the marriage plot, producing an ambiguous, inconclusive ending that is common in theatrical women’s fiction.24 Betha Durant in My Sister the Actress also seems ready to marry and continue her theatrical life but Marryat, like Buxton, does not depict the reconciliation between heroine and lover (Betha turned down her lover’s proposal of marriage in the second volume because ‘Art claims her, and she will be wedded to no-one else’ (My Sister, ii. 159)). The lacunae at the end of both novels remind us of the difficulties under which Buxton and Marryat were labouring in their attempt to claim the theatre as a ‘proper’ arena for women. Efforts to represent acting as a profession consistent with socially conservative conceptions of femininity falter at the point of marriage, as novels 23 For further discussion on actresses taking male roles see Jane W. Stedman, ‘From Dame to Woman: W. S. Gilbert and Theatrical Transvestism’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1972), 20–37, and Jill Edmonds, ‘Princess Hamlet’, in Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds.), The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914 (London: Harvester, 1992), 59–76. 24 With a touch of irony perhaps, Buxton titles the final chapter ‘Conclusive Correspondence’.

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shrink from incorporating an independent, self-reliant heroine into a traditional heterosexual union. Thus Marryat displaces the conflict between husband and actress-wife into a scene between actress-wife and traditionalist mother-in-law; thus conceived, the debate is between old-fashioned and modern attitudes to the stage. ‘“Forgive me”’, her mother-in-law-to-be begs, ‘“if my old-world prejudices ever induced me to say an unkind word of a profession which is ennobled by your presence”’ (My Sister, iii. 265). ‘Old-world prejudices’ about the theatre can be easily vanquished in the world of these novels; ‘old-world prejudices’ about women’s subordinate economic and legal position, on the other hand, still retain some force.25 In Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, Conrad Percy argued that theatrical performance will destroy a woman’s nature: ‘A public life must deteriorate women; they are thrown on the naked world, to have to deal, like us men, with all its bad realities; they lose all the beautiful ideal of their nature, all that is gentle, helpless, and confiding . . .’ (HS 216). 1870s and early 1880s theatrical novels, engaging with just this concern, are typically on the defensive: lengthy discursive passages adjure the reader to re-evaluate such ideas about the theatre and distance the true artist from the shallow actress of popular imagination. The narrator of My Sister the Actress furiously refutes ‘the conventional notion regarding the immorality of the theatre and everything connected with it’, stressing that ‘the private lives of many professional performers are much purer than those led by the votaries of fashion, lolling on their silken sofas and playing at being vicious for the mere sake of killing time’ (My Sister, ii. 28). Betha engages early on with her aunt’s assertion that actresses are ‘the very scum of the earth’: ‘“There are just as good women as yourself on the stage, Aunt Janie, and most of them are talented far above the ordinary run of people!”’ (My Sister, i. 187). Such characterizations of the theatre and the performer position theatrical women’s novels within a broader contemporary effort to redefine theatrical life as one of self-sacrificing labour and authentic action. The ‘feminization’ of the 25 One of the few novels to represent interactions between a married hero and heroine is Drewry’s Only an Actress. In a few scenes at the end, we are given a sense of the character of a marriage between a self-supporting heroine and her husband. The hero stresses that the part of wife must be the heroine’s most real, most authentic role henceforth: ‘“The triumph for outside,” he whispered softly, “for the world the great actress, but in this room only, where first I saw this dear face, take the welcome only such love as your husband can give you my darling—my wife!” ’ (Only an Actress, iii. 238).

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theatre made it possible for writers not at the vanguard of the feminist movement to imagine their characters working and fulfilling themselves emotionally outside the home; the texts examined here stress that conventional social life—with its superficial preoccupations, its tedious, unoccupied days—rarely offers the challenges and opportunities for public influence available in the theatrical sphere. Moreover, theatrical novelists suggest that authentic female performances are most plausibly created through the connection of body and impulse, the fusion of action with incipient desire, and in this they anticipate the work of fin de siècle feminists. New Women defined a woman’s impulses and desires more radically, but writers of theatrical women’s fiction do license the desire ‘to act’. The truly natural actress needs to act, they argue; and by authenticating the performance of such desires, theatrical novelists symbolically question efforts to limit women’s access to the public sphere. Novels of theatrical life destabilize the conception of transitional girlhood, an interim stage between childhood and adulthood, as definitively bourgeois. Girlhood in texts such as Sewell’s Ivors depends upon the existence of a leisured period between the schoolroom and marriage; theatrical fictions present the interim phase as one of practical, professional apprenticeship. On the other hand, this remains a firmly middle-class projection of girlhood experience, since these three-volume texts were hardly available to a working readership and are infused with middle-class cultural re-evaluations of the theatre. Mapping familiar terms and values on to the experience of labour for money, such novels essentially allow middle-class readers more easily to imagine themselves as public performers; to equate their social debut with that of the theatrical heroine. The truly natural actress needs to act, the texts stress—and so (as we shall now see) does the natural girl.

theatrical developments Theatricality was not only represented positively in theatrical women’s fictions of the 1870s; a surprising range of authors described their young heroines as theatrical beings. A young girl’s behaviour was termed ‘performance’, her actions seen as ‘impersonations’, her story framed as a ‘drama’ in texts replete with references to well-known (often Shakespearian) plays. On the one hand, evoca-

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tions of the girl as a performer remind us of the Victorian ambivalence about young women’s experiences of the transitional phase; innately transitional, neither fish nor fowl, the growing girl recalls Cary M. Mazer’s description of the actress as someone in the midst of ‘the very transgressive act of becoming someone else, of finding within herself other selves to become’.26 Yet many texts represented their sympathetic heroines in theatrical terms, and clearly expected the reader to recall and share in the pleasures of a time in which the individual experienced, and personally contributed to, a sense of profound social disorder. Transitional girlhood is both evoked as a time in which the world seems curiously upside down, topsy-turvy, and as one in which the girl herself may exploit opportunities for costume change, identity confusion, and gender role reversals. Moreover, as in the theatrical women’s texts investigated in the last section, performative impulses were represented as positive expressions of a young woman’s authentic inner self, impulses that rarely led a girl explicitly to challenge gender orthodoxies, but that invariably encouraged a fresh investigation of the limits imposed on the energetic, active, and forward-looking young woman. Margaret Oliphant was a writer who, in magazine articles and prose essays, emphasized the importance of upholding common gender norms. Women had weighty incentives, she stressed, for perpetuating the social order: ‘a woman has one duty of invaluable importance to her country and her race which cannot be overestimated—and that is the duty of being pure.’ Oliphant’s condemnation of female degeneracy in contemporary novels, for example, used markedly similar terms to Linton’s ‘The Girl of the Period’ (published about six months later): like Linton, Oliphant contrasted an ideal sylvan past with a degenerate, superficial present, laying the blame for this downward shift squarely on female shoulders. However, Oliphant situated the debate primarily in the realm of modern literature, charging sensation writers with corrupting the morals both of adult women and of ‘the young people who are growing up used to this kind of reading’. Oliphant particularly abhorred the representation of ‘immoral’ thoughts and deeds in novels such as Cometh Up as a Flower, fearing that Nell’s cheery, eccentric banter ‘is a specimen of what the young woman of the period considers sprightly, prepossessing, and lifelike’. Nell and heroines resembling 26

Cary M. Mazer, qtd. in Auerbach, Private Theatricals, 80.

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her ‘revel in a kind of innocent indecency’, she frets, ‘an ignorance which longs to look knowing—a kind of immodest and indelicate innocence which likes to play with impurity’.27 However, while Oliphant seems dedicated to preserving purity, order, and cultural orthodoxy in this review, one of her novels published only a few years later, Ombra (1872), is predicated upon a series of (what she herself termed) ‘Nasty thoughts, [and] ugly suggestions’.28 By the end of this little-read text, the titular heroine has produced a child in suspicious circumstances, to her mother’s considerable embarrassment. Moreover, the novel as a whole represents girlhood less as a phase of inviolable innocence and more as a time of unusual latitude, a performative stage in which the individual expresses her theatrical self and ‘plays with impurity’. Kate, the second heroine of the novel, is—like Nell or Bridget—a girl whose body expresses artlessness and performativity simultaneously: ‘At fifteen Kate Courtenay was the very impersonation of youthful beauty, vigour, and impetuous life. She seemed to dance as she walked, to be eloquent and rhetorical when she spoke, out of the mere exuberance of her being’ (Ombra, i. 9). An impersonator who seems inherently rhetorical, Kate is a natural actress. The world Kate inhabits is itself insistently theatrical. In one early scene, Kate (plausibly the narrator’s agent at this stage) criticizes two local vicarage girls who talk, dress, and behave alike: ‘I don’t object to people being alike; but I should try very hard to make you talk like two people, not like one, and not always to hang together and dress the same, if you were with me . . . Because,’ said Kate, endeavouring to be explanatory, ‘your voices have just the same sound, and you are just the same height, and your blue frocks are even made the same. Are there so many girls in the world,’ she said suddenly, with a pensive appeal to human nature in general, ‘that people can afford to throw them away, and make two into one?’ (Ombra, i. 66–7)

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night resonates: Antonio’s question, ‘How have you made division of yourself? | An apple cleft in two is not more twin | Than these two creatures’ seems a source not just for Kate’s interrogation of the vicarage girls, but for the entire novel.29 For the text continually compares and contrasts Kate and Ombra, 27

Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s, 102 (1867), 275, 265, 274. Margaret Oliphant, Ombra, 3 vols. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1872); Oliphant, ‘Novels’, 275. 29 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, v. i. 214–16. 28

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while the peculiar similarity of two cousins who look almost identical and are both named Bertie is an important puzzle. The use of a theatrical discourse and the evocation of similarities partly indicate the inauthenticity of the modern generation; Kate’s critique suggests that many girls of the period are shallow and insipid. However, Oliphant also employs pairings, replications, and doublings to create a world of extraordinary possibilities—a world in which resourceful girls may behave in unusual ways, experimenting with different personae and flaunting gender norms. Oliphant sometimes heightens the sense of difference between her two heroines, disingenuously distancing them from the ‘cleft apple’. At Kate and Ombra’s first ball, for example, a society lady named Lady Caryisfort watches the girls, and the narrator glosses her thoughts: ‘How different the two girls were! The bright one [Kate] . . . as calm as a Summer day; the shadowy one [Ombra] all changing and fluttering, with various emotions’ (Ombra, ii. 193). Yet this contrast is also regularly undermined, for Ombra’s disposition to change is shared by both girls (which perhaps explains Oliphant’s apparently idiosyncratic decision to name the novel after the less fully realized heroine). Kate, described on various occasions as ‘calm’, can also be ‘“contradictory and uncomfortable”’ (Ombra, ii. 289). At 15, she is wild and rebellious, taking on her tyrannical uncle as a figure of Britannia: ‘“I will not be your slave! I will never, never be your slave!”’ (Ombra, i. 26). Uncle Courtenay is horrified at ‘her force and untamableness’, pondering: ‘What should he do with this unmanageable girl?’ (Ombra, i. 21). The sense of confusing exchanges between the two girls is further heightened when, on the night of the ball, Ombra briefly appears as a reflection of Kate. Lady Caryisfort notes that the paler girl now possesses Kate’s brighter visage: ‘the pale girl, the dark girl, the quiet one . . . had changed . . . lighting up like a sky at sunset . . . A pretty, pensive creature, but bright for the moment, as was the other one—the one who was all made of colour and light’ (Ombra, ii. 190–1). Kate’s volatility and changeability is apparently due to ‘the feelings and sufferings of her age’ (Ombra, i. 27). Now that she is growing up, a disparity is beginning to appear between her inner and outer selves which indicates that, as Mazer puts it, she is ‘finding within herself other selves to become’: ‘Though she was still dressed in the sack-cloth of the schoolroom, there was an air of authoritative independence about her, more imposing a great deal than was that garb

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of complete womanhood, the “long dress,” to which she looked forward with awe and hope’ (Ombra, i. 9). Kate, hovering between childhood and womanhood, is also ambivalently gendered in social terms; she is the sole heiress to a considerable property, and thus occupies a position of power that is normatively masculine: ‘The fact that Kate was an heiress made, as it were, a man of her . . .’ (Ombra, iii. 20).30 Kate herself believes that her substantial inheritance makes her a leader and a local authority, in spite of her age and gender. Her uncle scorns her efforts to intervene in local church matters; Kate effectively diffuses his criticisms by taking a modern example of gender role reversal and female authority for her defence: ‘“Isn’t the Queen the head of the Church?—then, of course, I am the head of Langton-Courtenay . . .; you are only my guardian, and it is I who am the mistress here,”’ she adds, with the air of Elizabeth I, perhaps, more than Victoria (Ombra, i. 19, 20). Kate does not merely accept her position of authority, she revels in the prospect of ownership and command: ‘as she ran along the corridor, and into all the rooms, the thought of what she would make of them, when she came back, went like wine through her thrilling veins’; ‘she would be supreme!’ (Ombra, i. 122, 123). Indeed, Kate pushes at the possibilities of her masculinized position at the end of the novel by proposing marriage to Bertie Hardwick. Her aunt is horrified by behaviour that flaunts conventional codes governing romance: ‘“Kate, my darling, are you mad?—are you out of your senses?”’ (Ombra, iii. 308). Once again, Kate defends her behaviour through royal precedent: during her conversation with Bertie, she ponders, ‘“I wonder how the Queen felt, when —”’, and she later explains to her aunt: ‘“I am a kind of a princess. What can I do? He gave me encouragement, aunty, or I would not have done it”’ (Ombra, iii. 307, 308). Victoria represents a paradigm, a pattern of orthodox behaviour that nevertheless disrupts conventions (Bertie refers to himself somewhat ruefully as Kate’s ‘Prince Consort’—and, of course, Victoria’s own consort was named Albert). Queen Victoria appears in Oliphant’s novel as both a part and an example of a world turned upside down—a world in which people may switch roles and responsibilities, and where essentially conservative girls may experiment with men’s duties with comparative impunity. 30 Like Viola, Oliphant’s young heroine is ‘all the daughters of [her] father’s house, | And all the brothers too’ (Twelfth Night, ii. iv, 119–20).

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Thus the novel creates a world of apparent misrule, or more accurately, a ‘twelfth night’. Shakespeare’s play has been a shadowy presence throughout the text: Oliphant invokes the properties of this topsy-turvy world most potently in the final chapters, where Kate proposes marriage on ‘the evening of Twelfth Day’, elsewhere explicitly called ‘Twelfth Night’ (Ombra, iii. 301, 313).31 Nina Auerbach argues that Victorian commentators sought to present Shakespeare as ‘a fixed point’: ‘He never lies, never lures us into playing with shadows, spirits or dreams.’ Ombra, however, clearly uses and manipulates the more unsettling qualities of Shakespeare’s drama. Shakespearian twins threaten the spectator’s views about the integrity of ‘that center of natural and cultural coherence, the own self’, suggesting that one can metamorphose into two, whilst two can appear to be one.32 Oliphant uses this model in her depiction of the vicarage girls and the two Berties: she heightens the suggestion of metamorphosis and doubling in her representation of Kate and Ombra, as the girls developing into women share and exchange personality traits.33 The apotheosis of all this confusion occurs, as we have seen, on Twelfth Night, when Kate sets aside normative gender roles by proposing to her fiancé in a moment of (what Terry Castle has termed) ‘release from ordinary cultural prescriptions’.34 Yet if Twelfth Night functions in the novel as the moment of greatest release and disorder, it also serves as a stylized metaphor for girlhood itself, calling attention 31 Shakespeare’s plays are often referenced in women’s novels of the period. The Beautiful Miss Barrington positions itself as a nineteenth-century rewrite of King Lear; Felicia is an 1870s Cordelia, suffering the trauma of a capricious father: ‘“Regan and Goneril were good daughters in comparison with me!” ’ she comments ironically. ‘“Papa never departs from his calm gentlemanliness, or grows violent like Lear, but his words are quite as cutting in a quiet tone” ’ (BMB, ii. 254). When Felicia gives in to Mr Barrington’s whimsical demands, the 1870s version sees the girl go mad, rather than the father. 32 Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, 76. 33 Oliphant also adds further twists available to the novelist, luring the reader into confusion by wilfully obscuring which Bertie says what in their conversations and by refusing us access to Ombra’s consciousness. 34 In an influential discussion of the eighteenth-century masquerade, Terry Castle remarks that this subversive cultural gathering functioned to undermine conventional distinctions: ‘one was obliged to impersonate a being opposite, in some essential feature, to oneself.’ The revellers at a masquerade thus achieved ‘both a voluptuous release from ordinary cultural prescriptions and a stylised comment upon them’. Twelfth Nights perform a similar function, I suggest; this brief phase of misrule offers freedom from the regulations governing life the rest of the year and thereby provides comment on the constraining nature of those limitations. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), 5, 6.

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to the ways in which girlhood too functions as a time of liberation from, and a comment upon, the constraints of childhood and womanhood. Girl heroines are not only sources of disorder, they also enjoy evidence of disorder in the world around them; topsy-turvy inversions and reversions of gender and generational roles provoke particular pleasure. In Helen Mathers’s Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1875), for example, Nell Adair expresses herself heartily entertained by the scene of confusion at her first ball: Truly the scene is amusing enough, for everybody is revolving who has the means, without any question as to suitability in the age or size of that means: tall men dancing away from little partners, little men convulsively clutching tall women, old men and young maids, married women and young boys, fat girls dancing with Don Quixotes, Sancho Panzas puffing round with lean virgins. Everybody seems to have got the wrong partner, and not to mind it in the least. (Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, ii. 191)35

Nell is also an agent of disorder, a girl who longs to don men’s clothes and enjoy a man’s liberties: ‘“how . . . the hundred and one et ceteras that make up a girl’s costume, chafe and irritate me! what would I not give to be able to leave them all in a heap, and step into Jack’s [her brother’s] cool, comfortable, easy, grey garments?”’ (CTR, i. 45). When she plays sports at school, and is finally liberated from girl’s clothing, she is predictably ecstatic: ‘“At to what manner of female I look, I care nothing; my feelings are all I think about, and they are blissful”’ (CTR, i. 214). Nell’s joy at her experience of sanctioned transvestism and her exuberant pleasure at the unruly ball scene contrast sharply with men’s experiences of disorder in the novel: George, one of the text’s heroes, expresses himself deeply disturbed by the fact that women now use make-up to disguise their imperfections, thereby complicating once-clear distinctions between pretty and plain women (‘“The plain women make themselves such excellent imitations of their lovely sisters with their dyed hair, painted cheeks, and artificial charms, that it is not always easy to separate the make-believes from the really handsome people . . .”’ (CTR iii. 222)). Indeed, while Nell luxuriates in the delights of costume changes and role-reversals, George laments that such modern confusions turn a man’s mind ‘“into a horrible and disgusting jumble”’ (CTR iii. 223). And, turning back to Ombra, we find Bertie Hard35 Helen Mathers, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1875), hereafter referenced parenthetically as CTR.

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wick similarly bewildered by the disordered world Kate finds so stimulating; he is particularly bothered by the strange power dynamic that structures his relationship with his new fiancée. Upset by his financially subordinate position to Kate, Bertie grieves on Twelfth Night that he is ‘not even a briefless barrister’. ‘“Why had not she been Ombra, and Ombra the heiress?”’ he frets; ‘But, in that case, of course, they could not have married, or dreamt of marrying at all. He thought it over till his head ached, till his brain swam’ (Ombra, iii. 310). Building on this distinction between male and female reactions to disorder, Oliphant’s novel seems designed to gratify a woman reader’s pleasure; after all, the reader who enjoys the novel will presumably take pleasure in the unsettling literary and cultural play it institutes. For Ombra consistently ‘lures us into playing with shadows’, as Auerbach puts it. This is represented visually as well as thematically: the text is replete with references to and images of shade and shadow, which most obviously characterize Ombra.36 While the novel largely focuses on the sunny, ‘brighter’ Kate’s consciousness, the ‘drama’ of the narrative inheres in Ombra’s shadowy, strange behaviour: her motivations and possible experiences provide mystery (Oliphant tells us little of her real thoughts) and plot direction. Often the reader is forced to guess, with the other characters, what Ombra thinks and desires: at the ball, for example, when the girls catch sight of the two Berties unexpectedly, the narrator tacitly directs the reader to Ombra’s expression: ‘If the lively observer, who had taken so much interest in the strangers, could have seen the downcast face which Kate’s bright countenance threw into the shade, her drama would instantly have increased in interest’ (Ombra, ii. 181). The ‘lively’ reader of the novel is similarly expected to enjoy the ‘drama’ of the moral ambiguities and social disruptions surrounding, and at times caused by, Ombra and Kate. The insistent use of images of sun and shadow in the novel, and Oliphant’s association of this scheme with the ‘drama’ of her text, suggests the Manichaeistic images of black and white that Peter Brooks identifies in the work of other contemporary novelists such as James and Balzac. This scheme of stark oppositions, revived first in 36 In a typical pronouncement, Ombra insists: ‘ “I shall look like a shadow . . . beside you. You are sunshine—that was what you were born to be, and I was born in the shade”’ (Ombra, ii. 161). Bertie Eldridge even calls his yacht ‘the Shadow’, which Kate dimly realizes might have something to do with his feelings for Ombra.

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the melodrama, was used by writers to suggest the possibility of an ordered world, Brooks contends. It provided ‘a certain fictional system for making sense of experience’ by maintaining the absolute distinctness of moral and ethical contrasts; ‘[melodrama] comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political, concern.’ Brooks later adds that melodrama provided a sense of transcendent order; that it ‘strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to “prove” the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men’.37 Oliphant was a writer who insistently invoked binary oppositions in many of her most polemical conservative non-fictional pieces; virtue and vice, tradition and modernity, Englishness and foreignness, self-service and self-sacrifice are regularly paired and contrasted. Morality is presented as a straightforward, black-and-white affair—a strategy that, in Brooks’s terms, serves to ‘[make] sense of experience’ and locate order in a world that seems increasingly out of control. And yet Ombra contrasts sun and shade in ways that continually remind us of their interrelatedness; shadow is not blackness but rather partial concealment, uncertainty, equivocation. This corresponds to a surprisingly flexible moral scheme, a surprising unwillingness to cast Ombra and Kate as antiheroine/heroine (a scheme underpinning so many Victorian women’s novels). Kate seems to possess the author’s affection, and yet Ombra too is generally treated sympathetically; the curious question of when her pregnancy begins is deliberately put to one side, into the shadows, for this is not a novel about the iniquities of a degenerate woman nor about the sufferings of a victimized one.38 Ombra privileges shadow over black and white in both moral and literary terms, refusing to criticize—or explicitly 37 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. xvii, 5, 15, 20. 38 Ombra is secretly married to Bertie Eldridge, and becomes pregnant long before the fact of her marriage is known. Ombra’s mother, deeply embarrassed by her daughter’s unexpected maternity, resolves to keep their secret in the shadows henceforth: ‘She felt for the shock that this discovery would give to Kate’s spotless maiden imagination, unaware of the possibility of such mysteries . . . She would not have the candles lighted. The dark, which half concealed and half revealed her . . . would keep her secret best’ (Ombra, iii. 291).

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defend—its young heroines as they cross and recross conventional markers of appropriate and inappropriate female behaviour. Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) is a novel that adopts a similar scheme for similar purposes; Hardy establishes and then gradually fractures an apparently stable black-and-white scheme in the text, privileging shadow, moral ambiguity, and disorder. Yet this novel also directly criticizes efforts to construct rigid moral schemes in the first place, presenting its young heroine, Elfride, as a tragic case-study of what can happen when inflexible moral codes are applied to a transitional young woman’s behaviour. This is a step that Oliphant, it seems, was unwilling to take; representing girlhood as a fault-line, a Twelfth Night, she stops short of explicitly rejecting the social norms that are side-stepped by her young heroines. Like Mathers’s George, Hardy’s Henry Knight is keen to distinguish between different kinds of women, to find a means of differentiating between and thus ‘ordering’ members of the female gender: ‘“It is extraordinary how many women have no honest love of music,” he tells Elfride, “even leaving out those who have nothing in them”’ (A Pair of Blue Eyes, 178).39 The young, ‘scarcely formed’ Elfride is dissatisfied with Knight’s pronouncement: ‘“How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?”’ (PBE 178). Hardy’s text invites an interest in line-drawing, employing a series of oppositions in its metaphoric structure and in the plot itself. The tinted names (Knight and Swancourt) are consonant with the black-and-white scheme of the chessboard, a key symbol in the text; repeated games of chess also draw the reader’s attention to the conflicts between the characters.40 During the first chess match of the novel, in which Elfride plays Stephen Smith, Elfride is in control: her knowledge is superior, and she checks not only Stephen’s game but his wild, ‘impulsive’ ardour. Chess and love intermingle: the game of one is played out through the game of the other. It is unsurprising, therefore, that when Elfride later plays Knight, the narrator implies that she is unfaithful: The game began. Mr Swancourt had forgotten a similar performance with Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had begun to take for 39 Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), hereafter referenced parenthetically as PBE. 40 For further discussion on duplicated episodes in the plot see Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (London: Macmillan, 1982), 36–8.

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her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity of continuing faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a fickle behaviour almost as imperatively as fickleness itself . . . (PBE 163)

Elfride is out-played: after losing a series of matches, she succumbs to a feverish headache. The doctor ‘pronounced her nervous system to be in a decided state of disorder; forwarded some soothing draught, and gave orders that on no account whatever was she to play chess again’ (PBE 169). Elfride, overcome by her own debilitating potential for disorder, is forced to submit to her more stable master. On this occasion, the reference to ‘performance’ indicates Elfride’s decision to act a part in order to disguise the true nature of the situation—she is secretly engaged to Stephen Smith. However, the term appears on a number of other significant occasions in the novel, and it always encourages a reassessment of apparent circumstances. Twice, Elfride catches Stephen in a mysterious embrace. The first kiss is presented visually: On the blind was a shadow from somebody close inside it—a person in profile. The profile was unmistakably that of Stephen . . . Then another shadow appeared . . . This was the shadow of a woman. She turned her back towards Stephen: he lifted and held out what now proved to be a shawl or mantle—placed it carefully—so carefully—round the lady; disappeared; re-appeared in her front—fastened the mantle. Did he then kiss her? Surely not. Yet the motion might have been a kiss. Then both shadows swelled to colossal dimensions—grew distorted—vanished. (PBE 43)

The scene is highly theatrical: Elfride seems to be watching some kind of projected tableau or dumbshow. Elfride herself tacitly recognizes the theatricality of the episode, pondering, ‘Had the person she had indistinctly seen leaving the house anything to do with the performance?’ (PBE 45). Later, while waiting in the shadows of the drawingroom, she hears a second kiss. This time the embrace is unaccompanied by visual display, but Elfride still identifies the theatricality of the event, asking Stephen once again: ‘“You know nothing about such a performance?”’ (PBE 71). In both cases, Elfride is positioned as the baffled spectator or auditor, detached from the action of the scene. There is, as it turns out, a perfectly innocent explanation: Stephen is meeting his mother, who is of a lower class, and he has therefore hesitated to introduce her to the Swancourt family. These scenes serve to warn the reader that an observer may interpret a performance wrongly—and that the players in a scene may perform unwittingly.

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This counsel is central to the novel: the text forms an examination of contemporary society’s spectatorship and individuals’ performance (particularly in relation to girls, although these early scenes warn that a man may appear to behave in a theatrical manner, and that this too may be misinterpreted). Rather like Ombra, A Pair of Blue Eyes reveals a substantial interest in the theatre and its possibilities: Hardy succeeds the Preface with a list of players—‘The Persons’—and a description of ‘The Scene’, and the two are set out like a page in a script or theatre-bill. Throughout the text, the reader is tacitly asked to see the action as a piece of drama: for example, the narrator opens chapter 35 by remarking, ‘The scene shifts to Knight’s chambers’ (PBE 329). Furthermore, the characters themselves continually talk about life and human interactions in theatrical terms. Stephen reminds Knight of an earlier conversation in which the latter claimed that a man should expect inexperienced kisses from his beloved, since this would imply ‘“that we are the first who has played such a part with them”’ (PBE 131—a man may ‘play a part’ with a girl, the reader notes, although the girl must be innocent of previous romantic ‘action’). Elfride draws attention to the stylized parallel incidents in her life, describing them as ‘scenes’: ‘“You are familiar of course, as everybody is, with those strange sensations we sometimes have, that the moment has been in duplicate, or will be . . . I felt on the tower that something similar to that scene is again to be common to us both”’ (PBE 162). The use of theatrical machinery helps to interrogate whether what is seen and heard may be other than they seem; characters’ initial interpretations of actions and events are regularly called into question. Essentially, the novel tells of how Elfride is condemned by the two men she loves, and how their condemnation and her own behaviour lead ultimately to her death. However, the theatrical discourse in play throughout the text exposes the disparity between external appearances and the inner truth, suggesting that Elfride is both interpreted in an unfairly negative fashion, and becomes more morally faulty, because of the insidious values motivating the men around her. Ombra licenses its heroines to enjoy and contribute to the theatricality—the gender confusions and role reversals—of the world around them; Hardy combines a similar licensing effort with an attempt to recode theatricality as a phenomenon not only peculiar to, but also necessary in the sympathetic understanding of, girlhood. Knight has little sympathy for the notion of the ‘natural actress’,

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the girl whose body unconsciously performs her inner emotions. He regards Elfride as a self-conscious actress almost from the beginning, dissecting her behaviour in his diary: Aug. 7. Girl gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is born. After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness, it begins to act. Simple, young and inexperienced at first. Person of observation can tell to a nicety how old this consciousness is by the skill it has acquired in the art necessary to its success—the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career by actions which are popularly termed showing-off. (PBE 171)41

Knight clearly imagines himself to be the ‘person of observation’, watching and reading Elfride’s self-consciousness through her actions, charting her development through her ability to act successfully. Knight recognizes the performativity of girlhood, but he views this behaviour in traditional, negative theatrical terms; the desire to act is mere ‘showing off’, he suggests.42 Knight’s conviction that the innocent girl is a self-conscious performer is something of an anomaly, however, confusing his own dearly held (and socially conservative) oppositions of nature and artifice, integrity and superficiality. Sure enough, when Knight thinks more carefully about ‘her manner towards him,’ he becomes confused: Simplicity verges on coquetry. Was she flirting? he said to himself . . . The performance had been too well done to be anything but real. It had the defects without which nothing is genuine. No actress of twenty years’ standing, no bald-necked lady whose earliest season ‘out’ was lost in the discreet mist of evasive talk, could have played before him the part of ingenuous girl as Elfride lived it. She had the little artful ways which partly make up ingenuousness. (PBE 185)

Knight sets aside the problem by deciding that the distinction between the two is largely meaningless where young women are concerned—that girls will ‘naturally’ play the part of fresh-faced innocent to ensnare a man. 41 Knight’s notions of self-consciousness necessarily acquiring ‘the art necessary to its success—the art of hiding itself’ glosses Ovid’s maxim, ‘ars est celare artem’ (translated by Rev. James Wood as meaning ‘It is the perfection of art to conceal art’ (Dictionary of Quotations (London: Frederick Warne, 1902) ). The quotation frequently surfaces in 1870s theatrical literature: Nell, for instance, acquires ‘some dawning instinct’ of ‘that grand artistic truth, “Ars celare artem”’ (Nell, i. 115) [sic]. 42 Elfride’s party-trick is ‘to walk round upon the parapet of the tower—which was quite without battlement or pinnacle, and presented a smooth flat surface about two feet wide, forming a pathway on all the four sides’ (PBE 160).

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By collapsing the poles, Knight misses the point. For Elfride is a girl, a transitional heroine, and authentic behaviour for such a character (Hardy indicates) involves constant oscillations between simplicity and coquetry, childhood and womanhood, nature and artifice, morality and immorality. Elfride is performative, given to display and exhibition, but Hardy is at pains to normalize these characteristics and to dissociate them from a truly calculating selfconsciousness. Elfride is certainly cowardly and duplicitous in her dealings with Stephen and Knight, but the narrator stresses that she is ill-equipped to deal with the complexity of her situation. Unable to judge her own actions because of her youthful ignorance, she thinks of her relationship with Stephen as profoundly transgressive, disguising it until it assumes the shape of a heinous crime: ‘The reluctance to tell, which arose from Elfride’s simplicity in thinking herself so much more culpable than she really was, had been doing fatal work . . .’ (PBE 326).43 Moreover, Hardy positively celebrates Elfride’s transformative and performative impulses in the novel’s central, resonant cliff scene. Knight accidentally slips over a cliff’s edge while out with Elfride one rainy day: left hanging, he begs the girl to get help, but no one is near. When she comes back, however, she is carrying a bundle of white linen in her arms, which she presently fashions into a rope. It turns out that, with considerable ingenuity, Elfride has turned her own underclothes into a lifeline for Knight. Elfride’s transformative abilities are crucial here; Hardy simultaneously suggests her performative persona by referring to the ‘diaphanous exterior robe or “costume”’ she now wears (PBE 216). It is ironic, of course, that these are the exact qualities Knight will later reject: he ends the relationship because, he thinks, she has been an actress by deceiving him about the past, and he is also unable to cope with the idea that she has kissed and been kissed before. Knight treated Elfride’s youthful selfconsciousness with such calm, patronizing authority because he thought that, by observing it, he could understand it; he believed that by watching her process of development, he could control her. Hardy’s text demonstrates both that the ‘person of observation’ observes according to his own constructs of behaviour and that the 43 Hardy generally uses the term ‘simplicity’ rather than innocence in his representations of Elfride. This indicates, I think, that he does not find her guiltless in her dealings with Stephen and Knight, and I have taken this into account in my reading of the novel.

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process of scrutiny will prove enervating for the subject. Elfride, who was an ambiguously sympathetic character at the start of the novel is, towards its close, a focus of considerable narrative compassion. She finally realizes that Knight has only concentrated on her external self; that he has little sense of her personality. Her distress exposes her lover’s own superficiality: ‘“Am I such a—mere characterless toy—as to have no attraction in me, apart from—freshness? Haven’t I brains? You said—I was clever and ingenious in my thoughts, and—isn’t that anything?”’ (PBE 312). We may not be surprised to find Thomas Hardy working to upset social conventions and force cultural reappraisals; Hardy, of course, went on to contribute to the New Woman debates of the 1890s with Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead (Elfride’s passionate claim for respect anticipates the demands made by both these heroines). Oliphant’s motivations in Ombra, on the other hand, may seem more obscure. As a writer apparently committed to high conservative ideals, to the conventional ordering of the spheres, it may be hard to understand the license she allows her heroines in this novel. Yet, as my first few chapters have shown, to be a conservative Victorian woman writer was not to be blind to the inconsistencies in—and the costs of—high conservative attitudes to gender. Ambivalence about the doctrine of separate spheres or the importance of women’s economic subservience to men was not an unusual feature of a conservative text; indeed, it was positively characteristic. Of course, if authors like Oliphant (or Linton, or Buxton, or Yonge) are ‘merely’ conservative they may lose their appeal for some feminist critics. The political utility of writers is, as Nicola Diane Thompson hints, often at the heart of the reclamatory impulse: ‘While feminist criticism makes it possible in principle to recover forgotten women novelists, its ideological basis has limitations: what, for example, do you say about a conservative woman novelist like Charlotte Yonge once you’ve discovered her?’44 This statement supposes not only that Victorian conservatism and contemporary feminism are poles apart, but also that the former can have little place in a history ‘of our own’, as it were—the history of people like us. It is surely important to avoid turning Victorian writers into something as close to turn-of-the-twenty-first-century radi44 Nicola Diane Thompson, ‘Responding to the Woman Questions’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.

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cals as possible—to reclaim authors only by rendering their nuanced political views one-dimensional, univocal. Oliphant ultimately privileges neither conservative nor radical visions of gender relationships in Ombra, preferring to conceal her politics in the compromise of shadow.45 Together with authors from across the political spectrum, Oliphant refused to represent a girl’s desire for action, for playful experimentation, for public performance, in negative terms, ‘authenticating’ such impulses instead through a discourse of naturalness and sincerity. In Chapter 4, we shall see how this rhetoric of the natural served to legitimize an increasingly broad range of behaviour in the later part of the century: from around the 1880s, young women’s desires to attend university, take employment, and travel became increasingly acceptable in fictions aimed at a middle-class readership. The rhetoric of girlhood correspondingly shifted: Longfellow’s image of a girl left ‘standing, with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet’ remained in use but was regularly questioned. It seemed less appropriate to many late Victorians, who described the interim phase not so much as a time of pause as one of movement, less a phase of suspended animation and more a time of action. The genre of theatrical women’s fiction and the representation of girls as actresses in the 1870s and early 1880s may be seen as seminal in this development, encapsulating a changed and changing mood; a new vision of girls as energetic, self-confident, and culturally visible. 45 Oliphant was clearly in a state of flux about women’s role in society. She raged against society’s treatment of her sex in an article on ‘The Grievances of Women’, claiming: ‘Whatever women do, in the general, is undervalued by men in the general, because it is done by women.’ This behaviour is, she continues, ‘more inexplicable than any other by which the human race has been actuated’, and is something against which women ‘have to struggle blindly, not knowing whence it originates, or how it is to be overcome’. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Grievances of Women’, Fraser’s, 21 (1880), 698–710; 710.

4

‘Coming out’ Passages to Womanhood in British and Anglo-Indian Fiction, 1880–1894 introduction Loving, moral, and religious must be the character of the women and girls of a country if the homes over which they preside are to be pure, restful, attractive, and refined. Wherever the homes of the land fall below this standard, statistics prove that the strength, life, and progress of that country is sapped, notwithstanding its armies, laws, and its institutions.1

Girls of the 1880s were regularly warned that they held the key to the nation’s moral strength and development. In English Girls (1879), Isabel Reaney argues: ‘An able writer has said, “Whatever may be the custom and laws of a country, the women of it decide the morals.” Now, if this be true, surely the young English girl has a very responsible post to fill in the limited, or unlimited, circle of friends in which she moves.’2 Such accounts seem designed to convince girls of the value of home life, and thereby to reconcile them to the domestic sphere. Home may be a site of great conflict and crusade, commentators suggest, necessitating valiant, intrepid behaviour; no girl need look beyond her home for fulfilment and action on a grand scale. ‘There can be no greater mistake than to suppose that to be heroic, to live an heroic life, we must go outside the bounds of our little circle’, remarks the author of Girls and Their Ways (1881): ‘very often one’s family offers a battle-field calculated to prove all our energy, all our firmness of will, all our tenacity of purpose.’3 1 Emma Brewer, ‘The Girls of the World: Facts and Figures’, Girl’s Own Paper, 7 (1885–6), 198–9; 198. 2 Isabel Reaney, English Girls: Their Place and Power (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879), 28. 3 ‘One Who Knows Them’, Girls and Their Ways (London: James Hogg, 1881), 280.

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While didactic writings of the period continued, in other words, to affirm the importance of separate spheres for men and women, such texts simultaneously accepted and even sympathized with girls’ yearnings for greater freedom of action. In the 1860s, didactic nonfiction writers sought to shame the frustrated, rebellious girl; in the last two decades of the century, didactic authors worked hard to distance themselves from such critical attacks. ‘Phillis Browne’, a regular contributor to the Girl’s Own Paper (established in 1880) and author of the proactively titled What Girls Can Do (1880), established her sympathetic approach to modern young women by denying the very existence of Linton’s ‘girl of the period’: ‘If there are girls of the kind amongst us, I must have been particularly fortunate in my experience, for I never made the personal acquaintance of any one of them and I never knew any one who did’, she remarked.4 Moreover, writers regularly admitted—sometimes with startling candour—that domestic chores could be boring and even pointless. Thus Browne commends needlework, but only up to a point: ‘I should be very sorry to see a daughter of my own making a patch-work quilt like one that is now in my possession, and that was made by my mother when a girl’, she admits. ‘If I saw her busy with it, I should tell her it was a pity she had nothing better to do.’5 Like didactic writers of previous decades, Browne adopts a maternal tone to her readers, and her text is subtitled ‘A Book for Mothers and Daughters’; she signals a break with the attitudes of the past, however, by questioning the value of conventional feminine past times. Commentators also acknowledged that re-entering the home after years in the schoolroom could be a fraught and frustrating experience. In a lecture to school-leavers, Dorothea Beale emphasized the problems that arise in ‘that time of transition during which it is most difficult to reconcile duty to oneself with duty to others’. Released from the structure of schoolroom life, a girl may hope to pursue an independent course of study, Beale suggested; once actually in the home, however, domestic interruptions were likely to frustrate her ambitions.6 Other observers noted that girls ‘just out’ often missed ‘the regular hours and routine of school-room life’ and became 4 ‘Phillis Browne’ (Sarah Sharp Hamer), What Girls Can Do: A Book for Mothers and Daughters (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1880), 3–4. 5 Ibid. 5. 6 Dorothea Beale, ‘A Few Words To Those Who Are Leaving’ (London: George Bell, 1881), 5.

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painfully bored: ‘many a girl when she reaches this stage of her existence asks herself the question, “How can I best employ my time and the talents which God has given me?”’7 Many quite orthodox writers subsequently endorsed a fairly liberal programme of selfimprovement for the newly out young girl. W. H. Davenport Adams, who wrote a number of conservative texts on the role of women, on women travellers, and the history of British India, claimed on the one hand that a woman should aim to be ‘the angel in the house’, and should guide her husband—as Agnes led David—‘in the way of righteousness, and with gentle hand lead him upward and onward to the higher regions of devout thought and tranquil meditation’. Yet, on the other hand, Adams mourned the lack of great women in history, insisting that this must be attributed ‘to their fewer opportunities, to the conditions under which they have travailed, to the thraldom imposed upon them by custom and circumstance—the two potent enemies of greatness’.8 He went on to dedicate a large part of Woman’s Work and Worth (1880), much of which focuses on the training of ‘Our younger readers’, to a defence of higher education, listing institutions that admit women, describing courses and costs in detail, and also giving advice on employment. In another text, Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century (1883), Adams advised his readers to journey about the empire, encouraging them to seek inspiration from those ‘courageous ladies’ whose names ‘have been so brilliantly inscribed on the record of Eastern travel’.9 Writers increasingly sought to find a way of reconciling familybased ideals of womanhood with advice on how actually to enter a wider sphere, whether through education and employment or through travel and work within the empire. Reaney’s English Girls is a good example of this reconciliatory campaign: initially, she upholds an orthodox view on the duties of home-daughters, stressing that they must be satisfied ‘to occupy the place assigned to them at home, to fill which faithfully and to the best needs all the noble energy of purpose, all the high impulse of earnest living, of which a mind rightly balanced is capable’.10 Yet, like Adams, Reaney subsequently suggests that girls may like to go out into the world, recom7

‘Ximena’, ‘Just Out’, Girl’s Own Paper, 2 (1880–1), 775. W. H. Davenport Adams, Woman’s Work and Worth (London: James Hogg, 1880), 88, 366. 9 W. H. Davenport Adams, Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein, 1883), 184–5. 10 Reaney, English Girls, 8. 8

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mending mission-work as a way of combining duty with desire. ‘India has a claim upon us which no one loyal to our Sovereign the Queen would wish to repudiate or make light of’, she contends, and thus nothing should prevent a girl from becoming a missionary: should home ties and claims be such that she neglects no duty in doing so . . . Years gone by there were obstacles which made it difficult to transplant the life of an unmarried English lady into Indian soil. To-day these obstacles are for the most part removed, and no English girl with heart burning for the work need pause to undertake it because of the difficulties in the way.11

Reaney makes a compromise: a girl may pursue such a course as long as she does not neglect ‘home ties’; in other words, if there are one or two daughters left in the family willing to take up the domestic duties. This compromise was increasingly adopted by writers of the period: as Lily Watson (a writer for the Girl’s Own Paper) noted in an 1899 article on ‘Girls as Daughters’: ‘Let each have her own career or occupation . . . leaving one at least as the “home daughter.”’12 This settlement encapsulates the mood of writing aimed at girls in this period. Writers continued to elevate the domestic ideal while simultaneously encouraging relative self-determination, as long as this did not undermine—and, preferably, actively supported—the stability of family, nation, and empire. Indeed the empire, particularly India, became increasingly accessible to women during this period. Reaney’s vague reference to the lack of modern ‘obstacles’ presumably refers to Britain’s increased awareness and ‘knowledge’ of India and to the relative ease of travel between the two countries. Nupur Chaudhuri notes the longstanding centrality of India in the imperial consciousness: ‘Since the 1850s, India had become synonymous with the “empire” to many Britons.’ However, Chaudhuri emphasizes that interest in the country actually grew in the last quarter of the century, after Victoria became empress of India: ‘British newspapers and periodicals published a plethora of articles on Indian manners and customs and Indian flora and fauna. India became a household word in Britain.’ 13 In addition, travel between the two countries became easier as more 11

Ibid. 117–18. Lily Watson, ‘Girls as Daughters’, Girl’s Own Paper, 21 (1899–1900), 46–7; 47. 13 Nupur Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Jewelry, Curry and Rice in Victorian Britain’, in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), 231–46; 242. 12

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people did it and returned to tell the tale: Pat Barr, once a Memsahib herself, points out that women of the late Victorian period could receive advice about the journey from the ‘numbers of safely retired ex-mems’ back Home, who ‘delighted in giving advice to the young outward bound’.14 The journey itself was now hardly worth mentioning, contemporary writers like Isabel Savory remarked: ‘It is so easy to run home on three months’ leave—every subaltern does it; it is so easy to run out from England—every wife and sister does it . . .’15 This was also a period in which Britain became more generally conscious of its imperial possessions. J. R. Seeley famously remarked in 1883: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half of the world in a fit of absence of mind.’16 Seeley’s comments form part of an imperial ‘awakening’. Writers like Davenport Adams worked in the late 1870s and 1880s to extol British rule of India, emphasizing proudly ‘the boundless courage, resolution, and patient energy of the men’ who ‘have asserted the supremacy of Britain over two hundred millions of Asiatics’.17 For while colonial expansion was obviously a long-established policy, the 1880s saw the growth of what has been called a ‘New Imperialism’, a growth in imperialist fervour marked by profound jingoism. Twentieth-century commentators generally agree that this jingoism disguised an intense anxiety about the future of British rule. Robin Gilmour has emphasized the effects of the 1857–8 Indian Mutiny, ‘and the shock waves it sent out, a violent reminder of the fragility of the British presence in the subcontinent’.18 In the aftermath of the Mutiny, Indians were allowed to compete for positions in the ICS, a practice which ultimately undermined the concept of white inherent intellectual superiority.19 Claims for supremacy based on Aryan status also became less tenable during the Scramble for Africa, when white European powers 14 Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), 198. 15 Isabel Savory, A Sports-Woman in India (1900), qtd. in Barr, The Memsahibs, 200. 16 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883), qtd. in Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830–1890 (London: Longman, 1993), 182. 17 W. H. Davenport Adams, The Makers of British India (London: James Hogg, 1888), p. v. Davenport Adams’s Episodes of Anglo-Indian History (London: E. Marlborough, 1879), is activated by similar motives. 18 Gilmour, The Victorian Period, 180. 19 Kenneth Ballhatchet’s Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), discusses the threat posed by successful Indian candidates: see esp. 6.

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competed against each other.20 White nations therefore had to find new ways of justifying their inalienable right to rule, usually choosing to redefine or recodify their sense of the national ‘character’. Lingering behind the self-congratulation over ‘the supremacy of Britain’, then, was a feeling of intense unease—which was heightened as the national character itself began to seem under threat. Patrick Brantlinger has argued that fears of atavistic decline were seminal at the fin de siècle: ‘defensiveness, self-doubt, and worries about “fitness,” “national efficiency,” and racial and cultural decadence . . . characterise the end of the century.’21 As these remarks reveal, the late Victorian felt that his or her sense of the ‘natural’ world order was potentially being reversed; Britain’s grasp of the empire was threatened while the subjugated ‘barbarian’ races were displaying uncomfortable signs of advancement. Debate about women’s role back home fed into and inflamed this concern. In an article satirically entitled ‘The Future Supremacy of Women’ (1886), Eliza Lynn Linton noted with horror that ‘girls of eighteen or so’ had recently been involved in political canvassing. She argued that female political activity ‘can do no kind of good to Imperial politics, and it will do infinite harm to individuals . . . the character and tendencies of the [female] sex . . . will be influenced to harm and loss. It will immensely increase that discontent with their natural functions and assigned offices . . .’22 Maintaining her belief in the ‘naturally’ domestic duties of women, Linton demonstrates an increasingly ambivalent view of the stability of ‘Nature’ itself and the integrity of ‘natural’ ordering. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s 1874 article on the education of women and girls concluded: ‘Nature in the long run protects herself from our mistakes . . .’23 In ‘The Future Supremacy of Women’, Linton indicates that such a belief is becoming untenable: To part of my objections—the harm done to the character of women by their admission into public life, the loosening of the family tie, and the induction 20 For further discussion see Christine Bolt, ‘Race and the Victorians’, in C. C. Eldridge (ed.), British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), 130. 21 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 33. 22 Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Future Supremacy of Women’, National Review, 8 (1886), 1–15; 8, 6, 6. 23 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, Fortnightly Review, 15 (1874), 582–94; 594.

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of unsuitable persons into unfit offices—is given the one vague answer: Nature will adjust. Nature, as we have it, has not adjusted, in our sense, when it makes the Hindoo man a first-rate nurse, and the Amazonian army a capital fighting power.24

Linton’s article suggests that movements for women’s enfranchisement and threats in the imperial arena can both be seen as worrying examples of Nature’s refractoriness. Man, protecting his ‘true manhood’, must firmly counter and reverse alarming developments at home and abroad, therefore; ‘Else must we go back to root-eating and substantial barbarism.’25 Linton argues that the Englishman must be on his guard: Nature is not to be relied upon, and those representing the summit of the racial order may be dragged down to the bottom. These anxieties impacted in a number of ways on representations of girls in the transition to womanhood. To some degree, unease about the girl appears in a familiar form: like commentators in previous decades, essayists of the 1880s and early 1890s emphasized that ‘A girl is something more than an individual: she is the potential mother of the race; and the last is greater and more important than the first.’26 As in previous decades, commentators feared that ‘girls ambitious for their own distinction’ might undermine the maintenance and perpetuation of the nation by refusing the duties of motherhood.27 Potentially even more worrying was the possibility that education and employment would damage women’s reproductive systems, resulting in weak and sickly children. Linton reports a conversation she claims to have had ‘the other day’ with ‘one of the wisest and best-trained women I know’, who said: How much of all the grand force and nervous power, the steadiness and courage of Englishmen, may not be owing to the fact of the home life and protection of women; and how much shall we not lose when the mothers of the race are rendered nervous, irritable, and overstrained by the exciting stimulus of education carried to excess, and the exhausting powers of professional competition!28

Didactic authors’ insistent focus on the domestic sphere indicated their desire to accommodate girls’ needs without entirely reordering 24

Linton, ‘The Future Supremacy of Women’, 12. Ibid. 2. 26 Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Higher Education of Women’, Fortnightly Review, 46 27 28 (1886), 498–510; 503. Ibid. 508–9. Ibid. 504. 25

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the gender status quo. For texts were shaped by a belief that, now more than ever, girls’ acceptance of their conventional duties could be crucial to the preservation and promotion of a strong British empire. Women’s romantic fictions of the period are also typically supportive of imperialism, and they remain generally convinced that women’s occupation of the domestic sphere conferred considerable benefits on society as a whole. Yet while many of the fictions to be discussed in this chapter depict girls as champions of the imperialist project and as (ultimately) realizing the transcendent importance of marriage and motherhood, heroines are regularly positioned as ‘other’, as almost a race apart, from other Britons. The natural girl, unexposed to the influence of society, is metaphorically kin to the ‘uncivilized’ Indian, for example: both are evoked as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’. Narratives veer between presenting the ‘primitive’ girl as authentic and threatening, as pure and disruptive, a pattern common in late-Victorian imperialist discourse: as Patrick Brantlinger has demonstrated, later Victorian writing of empire is typically characterized by oscillations between panic at the possibility of future barbaric invasion and Britain’s own potential for atavistic decline, and fascination with the idea that ‘savage’ peoples are closer than ‘civilised’ Britons to deep, authentic human impulses.29 Representations of the unassimilated, natural girl draw on a panoply of images of racialized exotic womanhood in particular; as we shall see, distinctions between nations and races are oddly complicated, even obfuscated, as authors conflate colonized countries like India with Italy, Spain, and the south of France. All are associated with a freer, more untutored mode of femininity, with an intuitive responsiveness to the promptings of the inner life that stands in stark contrast to a British woman’s stern suppression (or even ignorance) of her inward dreams and desires. In the process, the long-popular garden of Eden narrative takes on new connotations, new cultural bearings; the girl’s insurgent needs are sometimes terrifying, often importunate, but always deeply, inescapably ‘natural’. What develops is a sense of the female inner life—the ‘terra incognita’—as inexorably emergent: the desire to attend university, to take a job or find action through travel may be 29 See Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, esp. ch. 8. For a contemporary account of the appeal of ‘savage’ figures see F. Max Muller, ‘The Savage’, Nineteenth Century, 17 (1885), 109–32.

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culturally alarming, but such ambitions are articulated as the insurgent expressions of the authentic, energetic, developing female self. Moreover, while this vision of young women’s potential surfaces regularly in the traditional woman’s romance, it positively structures and characterizes a new, radical, and self-consciously feminist wing of women’s fiction: the New Woman novel.30

the savage within Look . . . at that slip of a girl, unkempt, ragged, but with the promise of exceeding beauty in the white gleam of close-set teeth, and the soft eyes glowing in the oval, tawny face, full of the free, joyous abandon of untrammelled childhood. Many a man might be proud to woo such a bride when the child will have merged in the woman . . . She may prove false to her kindred and wed the ‘Gorgio’ [non-gipsy], but frequently she pines and dies. Bare walls and oaken beams choke the breast whose every breath was the wide air of heaven . . . and the lover who had taken this wild bird to his bosom, finds her beating her bruised and drooping wings in her narrow cage.31

In ‘The Children of Mystery’, an 1886 article from All The Year Round, the writer celebrates gipsies as the last remaining ‘children of Nature’. ‘Soon the world will not contain a nook or corner untrodden by human foot, and sacred to the spirit of Romance’, remarked the author of Girls and Their Ways, articulating a commonly held fear that humans were trampling over nature and exploding longpreserved mysteries in their drive to explore, conquer, and civilize the globe.32 As the colonizing Briton forayed out into the empire, a 30 Book-length studies of New Woman literature include Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (London: Macmillan, 1978); Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990). 31 ‘The Children of Mystery’, All the Year Round, 39 (1886), 86–91; 88–9. 32 Ibid. 88; ‘One Who Knows Them’, 196. For further discussion on the ‘domestication’ that followed Victorian exploration and imperialism see Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, esp. 37–8, 238–9.

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welter of guide books and standardized tourist packages came in his wake. This opened the world up to an increasing number of Victorian travellers, but it also threatened the culture’s perception of romantic, imaginative realms still extant; of dark, mysterious foreign countries on to which a range of desires and fantasies could be projected. Responding to, and presumably inspired by, this concern, late Victorian folklore enthusiasts elevated and endlessly discussed gipsies, arguing that this nomadic nation still represented a ‘dreamy mystery . . . on which history has thrown no side light’. Anachronistically preserved in the face of ‘the quick march of nineteenthcentury civilisation’, gipsies—particularly those on British soil— allowed the Victorian a glimpse of ‘the wild, free life, which somehow seems to gain a keener fascination, as the fetters of civilisation and urban conventionalism close more tightly around us’.33 The gipsy girl at the heart of ‘The Children of Mystery’ has counterparts in women’s fiction throughout the period: various texts represent ‘half-savage’ or alien girls, girls of gipsy appearance, who feel shackled by modern British society.34 The characterization of the girl as gipsy-like immediately stresses her potential for cultural disruption: as Deborah Nord has argued, ‘gypsy figures mark not only cultural difference but a deep sense of unconventional, indeed aberrant, femininity’ in much Victorian women’s writing. Nord notes that ‘gypsydom could function imaginatively as an “escape” from English conventionality’, particularly for women who wanted to express ‘their feelings of an almost racial separateness’ from society.35 The girl likened to a gipsy may thus be explicitly British yet coded as racially and ethnically ‘other’; heroines may (and often do) explicitly support the imperialist mission, but their figurative association with the gipsy signals that they are also victims of Britain’s relentless drive to homogenize. Yet we shall see later in this chapter that the gipsy was not the only exotic figure available to the woman writer. A range of romanticized figures were used to express a heroine’s difference, her ‘feelings of an almost racial separateness’. Gipsy characteristics 33 ‘The Children of Mystery’, 87, 91; ‘More About Gypsies’, Spectator, 55 (1882), 1481–2; 1481. The Gypsy Lore Society was founded in 1882 under the presidency of Charles G. Leland, a former Gettysburg soldier, an influential American journalist, and a political activist. The Society produced a quarterly magazine which published scholarly research articles on gypsy history, culture, and language. 34 ‘The Children of Mystery’, 88. 35 Deborah Nord, ‘“Marks of Race”: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing’, Victorian Studies, 41 (1998), 189–210; 190.

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together with Italian, Spanish, French, and Indian heritage signal an unusual young woman, an individual who finds the ‘cage’ of British society close to unendurable, in the work of writers across the political spectrum. Eliza Lynn Linton was, of course, famously an author of antifeminist non-fictional prose, a furious critic of (what she saw as) female degeneracy and a staunch advocate of the separation of the spheres. Linton was also a novelist, and her fiction reveals that although she became increasingly critical of the woman’s movement, she took as agnostic a position on contemporary gender politics as she did on questions of religion.36 Linton’s ambivalence about women’s social position is particularly evident in her 1880 novel, The Rebel of the Family, a text that concentrates on the travails of Perdita Winstanley, a young republican ostracized by her shallow, bourgeois family. Perdita is a little older than many of the heroines examined in this book; at the start of the novel she has just turned 21. However, she is a girl who finds the transition to adult Victorian womanhood almost impossible: ‘The heart and soul of all poor Perdita’s lamentations and day-dreams was always this wish—that she had been born a boy . . . The Sturm und Drang period with her was severe’ (The Rebel of the Family, i. 31).37 She finds the politics and mores of the contemporary social order alienating: ‘she had the impiety to regard kings and queens as so much political finery good only for the childhood of society—she dared to say that the land should belong to him who tilled it . . .’ (RF i. 9). After a passionate argument in which Perdita begs to be allowed to work, Mrs Winstanley openly questions her relationship to her daughter: ‘“you make me sometimes wonder whether you are my child at all or whether you were not one day changed at nurse. I cannot see a daughter of mine in the extraordinary and unconventional young person that you have become”’ (RF i. 146).38 The youngest 36 I discuss this in more detail in ‘Conflict and Ambiguity in Victorian Women’s Writing: Eliza Lynn Linton and the Possibilities of Agnosticism’ (Tulsa Studies, forthcoming). Ann Ardis classifies both The Rebel of the Family and the novel I shall discuss next, Annie Edwardes’s A Girton Girl, as early New Woman novels, since both portray heroines actively engaged in taking up new opportunities for women. See Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 31. 37 Eliza Lynn Linton, The Rebel of the Family, 3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), hereafter referenced parenthetically as RF. 38 For discussion on Linton’s own fantasy that she was not raised by her real family see Nancy Fix Anderson, Woman Against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), 58–60.

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girl, Eva, carries the idea even further, associating Perdita with a figure who is, in Nord’s words, ‘on the outskirts of the English world, unassimilable, a domestic and visible but socially peripheral character’:39 ‘How funny it would be if Per were not our sister!’ said Eva; ‘if we found our own in a gipsy’s camp and Per turned out to be a gipsy’s child!—What fun!’ For a moment Perdita looked at her mother with a white, scared face as if she had been suddenly frightened. The blood left her cheeks . . . ‘And if you do not believe that I am your child,’ she said, her voice quivering with wild emotion; ‘I can scarcely believe that you are my mother. You do not act like one towards me; and I might be nobody’s child for all the home or mother I have! I wish I could find out that I belonged to the gipsies, or to any one else rather than to people who treat me as all of you do!’ (RF i. 146–7)

Perdita reminds us of another heroine who became one ‘of the dark unhappy ones’ in spite of herself.40 As a child, Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver ran away to the gypsies: ‘she had been so often told she was like a gypsy, and “half wild,” that when she became miserable it seemed to her the only way of escaping opprobrium . . .’ Indeed, as she approached the camp and met a young gipsy woman, Maggie was ‘reassured by the thought that her aunt Pullet and the rest were right when they called her a gypsy, for this face, with the bright dark eyes and the long hair, was really something like what she used to see in the glass before she cut her hair off’ (MF 332, 104, 107). Maggie and Perdita alike grasp the reference to gipsy heritage as a kind of explanation for their feelings of alienation from their families. While others attribute gipsy ancestry to the heroine to distance themselves from her unconventional behaviour, the girl herself finds the gipsy a handy mode of self-expression.41 Linton retains the contrast between Perdita’s naturalness (and consequent sense of alienation) and the shallowness of polite society throughout the novel. Indeed, and perhaps surprisingly given her infuriated response to women’s employment in articles like ‘The Future Supremacy of Women’, she uses it to authenticate Perdita’s 39

Nord, ‘“Marks of Race” ’, 189. This is obviously not the first time girls have been described in these terms. Cathy Earnshaw proves her kinship with the ‘gypsy’ Heathcliff by being a ‘wild, hatless little savage’: ‘At fifteen she was the queen of the country side’, Nelly Dean tells Lockwood. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; New York: Bedford St Martin’s, 1992), 63, 74. Margaret Holt in Sylvan Holt’s Daughter is also known as ‘Gipsy’. 41 For further discussion on this episode see Nord, ‘ “Marks of Race” ’, 200–2. 40

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job in the post office savings bank, adopted in the teeth of her mother’s opposition. Perdita, we are told, is disappointed to find that her co-workers do not share her approach to their labour; she realizes that their work is advancing the imperial endeavour. ‘She had expected to find in them the same political principle and high-strung earnestness which she herself carried into her work’, Linton notes: ‘the same proud consciousness of participating in the conduct of the Imperial Government which made her routine business letters and dry rows of figures essentially poems’ (RF ii. 52). Explicitly, Linton continues to criticize such employment: the post office girls’ career ‘was the world’s loss, inasmuch as, had they been wives and mothers, it would have been the world’s gain’, she remarks (RF ii. 53). Yet Perdita’s wild, energetic, intemperate qualities (her ‘high-strung earnestness’) ultimately render her more fit for her employment, it seems, distinguishing her from her listless, lackadaisical peers: ‘Perdita found the one same prosaic unconcern to the Imperial importance of their doings. Not the faintest trace of sentiment, enthusiasm, or patriotism illumined their path with ambition or fortified it by principle’ (RF ii. 54). Ironically, Perdita’s gipsy-like quality makes her a better imperialist, not to mention a better member of the post office workforce. Perdita’s gipsydom signals her difference, her alienation, but it also indicates her naturalness, authenticity, and thus value in Linton’s social scheme. Perdita may use the gipsy to express her sense of her own marginal position, but Linton uses the figure to map out the ideal characteristics of a new generation of young Englishwomen. Annie Edwardes’s A Girton Girl (1885) uses related images of romanticized racial otherness to sanctify another newly emerging contemporary aspiration: girls’ desires for a university education. Edwardes’s novel, like Linton’s, synthesizes polemic on the importance of marriage and motherhood with sympathetic pronouncements on its unorthodox heroine’s ambitions for self-government. The 17-year-old heroine of the text, Marjorie Bertrand, is discussed in the early pages by Geoffrey Arbuthnot, Geoffrey’s cousin Gaston, and Gaston’s 22-year-old wife Dinah; Geoffrey is about to prepare Marjorie to sit the Cambridge entrance examinations, but he has not yet met his pupil. We learn that Dinah and Marjorie are almost certainly opposites: Dinah ‘was an altogether unique specimen of our mixed and over-featured race: white and rose of complexion; chiselled of profile, with English-coloured hair (and this hair is neither

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gold nor flaxen nor chestnut, but a subdued blending of the three) . . .’ (A Girton Girl, i. 14–15).42 Geoffrey imagines that Marjorie, by contrast, will be ‘a black-eyed, atrociously clever-looking young person’ with ‘shining hair drawn tightly from her forehead, with stiff linen collar and wristbands, with a dignified manner and inkstained fingers’ (GG i. 83). If Dinah is the ultimate incarnation of natural English womanhood, Marjorie is projected as an unattractive, inflexible figure with something suggestively foreign and gipsy-like about her ‘black eyes’ (the young gypsy girl in ‘The Children of Mystery’ had ‘bold black eyes’, and noted folklorist Charles G. Leland invariably attributed ‘burning black eyes’ to the young gipsy woman).43 Yet when Geoffrey actually meets Marjorie, he finds ‘a child dressed in a white and red cotton frock, confined by a brightcoloured ribbon round the slim waist’ (GG i. 112). Initially thinking that she is some local child, he nearly scoops her up in his arms, amazed to discover that the Girton horror is actually ‘a little country girl with sun-kissed hands, innocent of inkstains, [with] a child’s fledgling figure, a child’s delightful boldness’ (GG i. 115). Marjorie baffles Geoffrey for a number of reasons. He cannot decide how to treat this transitional girl, nor can he determine her race and nationality. He sizes her up, starting with her hair: The style was too foreign, altogether, for English taste . . . The complexion, too, to a man who for years had had a living ideal of snow and rose-bloom before him, was certainly sallow. And those great black eyes ... And behold! her eyes were blue; intensely blue as, I think, only Irish or Spanish eyes ever are . . . (GG i. 121)

Marjorie turns out, indeed, to have Spanish ancestry, and she identifies strongly with the women of her country, insisting on their need for education: ‘“Spanish women have had no chances at all,” cried Marjorie . . . “For their sake I mean to work—yes, to get to the level of a B.A., grandpapa, in spite of your withering contempt”’ (GG, i. 139). While Marjorie has now been revealed as an ‘ordinary’ girl (not a bluestocking), her heritage initially seems designed to devalue her statements on the importance of women’s education. Southern European heritage is often associated with passion, freedom, and excess in Victorian discourse: not necessarily denoting wrongdoing, it 42 Annie Edwardes, A Girton Girl, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1885), hereafter referenced parenthetically as GG. 43 ‘The Children of Mystery’, 88; Charles G. Leland, The English Gypsies and Their Language (London: Trubner, 1873), p. vii.

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is implicitly a sign of wildness and lack of self-control. For example, W. H. Davenport Adams contrasts Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Miranda with ‘the impassioned Juliet, who is not less pure or maidenly, but in whose veins throb the passions of the sunny south. She is less reserved, therefore more entire in her abandonment; speaks where Miranda would be silent, and kisses where Miranda would care only to blush . . .’44 Marjorie may lack the ‘black eyes’ of the gipsy, but her southern inheritance carries similar implications of the unregulated, the excessive, the erratic. Thus the exposure of Marjorie’s real inheritance involves exchanging one alien identity, the gipsy, for another that is conceptually related—the Spaniard. Indeed, Victorian folklorists often associated the gipsy and the southerner: Charles Leland claimed that ‘every Spaniard is at heart a Bohemian. He feels what a charm there is in a wandering life, in camping in lonely places’, while the writer of ‘The Children of Mystery’ describes ‘the lithe, graceful figure’ of a young gipsy boy, ‘striking the unconscious beauty of a Southerner’s attitude against the rugged tent-door’.45 The other characters in Edwardes’s novel thus continue to perceive Marjorie as alien, using her southern ancestry as an implicit ‘black mark’ against her. Much later in the novel, for example, when Geoffrey and Marjorie have fallen in love, Geoffrey sets aside the rage Marjorie demonstrates when she discovers that she is not his first love: ‘Marjorie was not a woman, he remembered, only an impetuous girl, with southern blood in her veins . . .’ (GG iii. 54). Marjorie’s efforts to express opinions are attributed to the combined erraticism of her youth and of her nationality. And yet the novel proceeds to undermine Geoffrey’s reactionary views, engaging a more positive view of unassimilated femininity in its support for Marjorie. Geoffrey’s views on girlhood are satirized and quickly dismissed as untested hypotheses: ‘His knowledge of young girls, their instability, their hot and cold fits, their tempers, their fluctuating emotions, had been derived from books. So his theories on the subject were mainly worthless’ (GG i. 215). Edwardes also undermines her characters’ response to Marjorie’s ancestry by signalling that it generates an unusually authentic being. Marjorie’s face and physique are marked by her unusual way of life: ‘the chiselled Southern face [was] over-kissed by sea and sun for some English tastes, but pure, fresh, as the wine-dark roses over which she 44 45

Davenport Adams, Woman’s Work and Worth, 123. Leland, The English Gypsies, p. ix; ‘The Children of Mystery’, 88.

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bent’ (GG i. 274). Like the gipsy girl ‘whose every breath was the wide air of heaven’, Marjorie is used to living and running wild in nature: her southern complexion renders her particularly responsive to the effects of natural phenomena, such as sun and sea. Marjorie is thus both predisposed to authenticity and has developed along peculiarly organic lines. Her naturalness is thrown into even sharper relief by Dinah’s dull, sedentary, domestic life. ‘“I know nothing about intellect, except what I hear from Geoffrey and my husband”’, she remarks proudly in the early pages of the novel; ‘“I am quite uneducated myself”’ (GG i. 36). The novel warns of the dangers of such ignorance; bored by his submissive wife, Dinah’s husband pursues a bachelor existence outside the home. All alone in the house, Dinah spends her life in endless, futile needlework (Phillis Browne would surely not have approved): At moments of more than common loneliness she would feel that her life was being recorded—mournfully, for a life of two-and-twenty—in these large and not artistic embroideries. It seemed as though she stitched with a double thread, as though a dull strand of autobiography for ever intertwined itself among the flaunting roses, the impossible auriculas and poppies that grew beneath her hands. (GG i. 165)

Dinah’s occupation is faintly suspicious for a model Victorian woman: the ‘double thread’ combines dutiful mundane life with fantasy, expressed through the sensual ‘flaunting roses’. The apparently stereotypical comparison of woman and rose itself contributes to the contrast between Marjorie and Dinah, for while Dinah initially appeared to be an archetype of natural womanhood, her ‘snow and rose-bloom’ complexion (we now realize) has been preserved through a life spent indoors fashioning copies of flowers. Marjorie, on the other hand, has been outside amongst the roses throughout her youth. She therefore expresses her inner desires immediately and without reserve; Dinah meanwhile is unable to understand, articulate, or act upon her frustration with her life and marriage to the cavalier (and almost certainly adulterous) Gaston. The idea that southern European heritage produces an unusual receptiveness to nature which, in turn, disposes a girl to comprehend her own desire for freedom, is explored in more obviously polemical terms in Mona Caird’s early (and now almost completely ignored) New Woman novel, Whom Nature Leadeth (1883). Caird went on to become an important fin de siècle feminist (writing particularly

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provocatively on ‘The Morality of Marriage’ in 1890): her early novel demonstrates an intriguing indebtedness to a tradition of women’s popular fiction. Like Marjorie, the heroine of the narrative (named Leonore) is southern European; once again, this inheritance generates a particularly ‘natural’ character. In the early stages of the novel, moreover, Caird equivocates about Leonore’s race rather as Edwardes prevaricates about Marjorie’s ancestry, telling us only that ‘Other than English blood flows in [Leonore’s] veins’ (Whom Nature Leadeth, i. 15).46 Later, she associates Leonore with the south of Europe: ‘Leonore looked almost as if she must have Spanish blood in her veins, with her masses of dusky hair, her dark brown eyes, and a sort of Southern glow and richness, not only in face and form, but in her every expression and gesture’ (WNL i. 131). The highly equivocal nature of Caird’s description (Leonore ‘looked almost as if she must have Spanish blood’, she has ‘a sort of Southern glow’) leaves a question mark hanging over Leonore’s ancestry. Rudyard Kipling suggests in his short story ‘Kidnapped’ that the term ‘Spanish’ was sometimes used to describe people of Indian heritage: Miss Castries, he remarks, ‘was good and very lovely—possessed what innocent people at Home call a “Spanish” complexion’.47 Caird’s disingenuous refusal to name Leonore’s heritage may stem from a desire to leave her heroine’s race open to all interpretations—and, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter, Indian ancestry was associated with similar ideas about receptiveness to nature at this time. In fact, Caird finally admits that her heroine is part-Italian, and Italy, since Aurora Leigh at least, has been used by women writers to suggest a place of liberty, a contrast to the restraints of Britain. When Leonore visits the countryside of her birth, like Maggie Tulliver she notices her relationship to the people around her and ponders on her possible inheritance of their physical and psychological characteristics: ‘She owed to them no doubt her own dark masses of hair, her eyes, and many a trait of character. Her temperament had descended to her perhaps, who could tell? from some old ancestor, some obscure inhabitant who had lived and died here years ago . . .’ (WNL iii. 162). In a literary sense, Leonore’s traits surely descend from Aurora herself. Aurora and Leonore are both half46 ‘G. Noel Hatton’ (Alice Mona Caird), Whom Nature Leadeth, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), hereafter referenced parenthetically as WNL. 47 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Kidnapped’, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 97–101; 98.

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Italian on their mother’s side; both are brought up in Britain, and both find their British upbringing enervating. Favouring the freer existence of their mother’s country, both girls militate against the belief that ‘English women . . . | Were models to the universe’ (Aurora Leigh, i. 444, 446).48 Leonore is set apart from her peers by a difference that is physical, not just intellectual or political: ‘She is very young; seventeen, or perhaps eighteen years of age, but already there is a glow and richness about her beauty very rare among English maidens . . .’ (WNL i. 13–14). Having spent much of her life outside and alone in a life of ‘noble simplicity’ (WNL i. 15) she has grown up, like the gipsy girl, a ‘wild creature of the woods’. By her late teens, Leonore has developed a unique intellect and personality: ‘She was simple where more experienced young ladies would have been knowing; she was penetrative where their minds were a dismal waste. She had never been “brought up;” she had scrambled up by herself, like some wild weed of the field or marsh . . .’ (WNL i. 28). Caird’s representation of this natural girl clearly owes much to the popular Victorian woman’s novel, the garden of Eden plot in particular. Many another heroine examined in this book is set apart from other girls by her preference for the unfettered existence of countryside life; many another girl has, like Leonore, grown and developed organically, relieved from the oppressive regulations of schoolroom and society. The structure of Caird’s novel also reveals a debt to earlier conservative women’s texts, for Leonore, again like her conservative counterparts, is disturbed during her countryside musings by a young suitor, who first brings painful knowledge to Eden. Crawford Stephens (like Annie Edwardes’s hero Philip Earnscliff, for example) warns the heroine that pleasurable girlhood must ‘settle down’ into the stability of adulthood. All heroines oppose leaving Eden, but Leonore’s resistance to the model before her is articulated in explicitly radical terms: ‘“That sounds very dreary: girls seem to be a sort of social sediment; they can’t fulfil their uninteresting mission until they have ‘settled down.’ You see if I don’t resist my destiny”’ (WNL i. 28). Whom Nature Leadeth thus draws on a tradition of writing about unassimilated femininity, unearthing the critical social comment 48 The theory that Italy was used in Aurora Leigh to express ‘both a mother’s desire for bella libertà and a daughter’s desire to resurrect the lost and wounded mother’ was most famously advanced in Sandra M. Gilbert’s ‘From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento’ (1984), in Angela Leighton (ed.), Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 24–52; 48.

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latent within the garden of Eden narrative. Many of the texts examined in this book position themselves against society; the natural girl has not been perverted by frivolous social concerns and is consequently in touch with a more authentic self. In this chapter we have seen that a number of authors marked their heroines as racially other by associating them with the gipsy or the southern European. Caird invokes these literary schemes but uses them for explicitly feminist purposes: Leonore is uniquely able to understand her need to resist ideologies of domestic womanhood because of her natural upbringing and Italian ancestry. Using a traditional conservative plot for overtly political ends, Whom Nature Leadeth forms an important link between socially conformist women’s fictions from the earlier part of the century and the more famous and structurally experimental feminist texts of the 1890s. Yet Caird’s novel also stresses that southern heritage is not a necessary prerequisite for cultural and social dissidence. Caird contrasts two heroines in the novel, Leonore, who has ‘scrambled up by herself’, and the 20-year-old Josephine Harvey, a girl conventionally schooled and trained. Josephine appears a perfect representative of her nation, displaying ‘fresh English bloom’ and ‘the fair fresh cheeks of the English girl’ (WNL ii. 39, 2). However, over the course of the novel Josephine gradually becomes aware of ‘a novel sense of insufficiency at home—in her sister, in her lover, in herself’ (WNL i. 234). Her feelings of dissatisfaction are initiated by her friendship with Leonore, who inspires a kind of epiphany: ‘Since her intimacy with Leonore, she had been conscious of a subtle inward change, a sort of awakening, as if through a mist an unknown world were looming into sight’ (WNL i. 234).49 The reference to ‘an unknown world’ indicates that the awakening provides access to a psychic terrain apart from England; it also involves journeying literally to a new country. Josephine’s sister, Lady Alderstone, tries to remove the girl from Leonore’s orbit by taking her travelling on the Riviera. Leonore’s influence is in fact reanimated by the southern climate: mere access to the sunny skies, it seems, can awaken and animate long-repressed desires: 49 Josephine’s epiphanic discovery of an ‘unknown world’ within anticipates George Egerton, who argued that a woman should tell ‘the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her . . .’ ‘A Keynote to Keynotes’, ed. John Gawsworth (Terence Armstrong) (1932); qtd. in Martha Vicinus, Introduction, Keynotes and Discords, by ‘George Egerton’ (London: Virago, 1983), p. xiv.

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Lady Alderstone . . . did not know that the country, and the skies, and all the warm, free picturesqueness of the South, were rapidly carrying on those very changes which Leonore’s unconscious influence had initiated. To enlarge the girl’s experience, excite her wonder, feed the awakening emotions and instincts of her higher nature, was not the way to make her pick her steps more carefully along the meagre tape-wide track of British Custom. (WNL ii. 14)

In fact, neither the meeting with Leonore nor the trip to the Riviera is entirely responsible for Josephine’s awakening: there is, the narrator comments, more to the young girl than meets the eye. Like Leland’s Spaniard, ‘There was a touch of the Bohemian in Josephine Harvey, could her relations but have known it’ (WNL ii. 14). Josephine’s conscious dissatisfaction with a limited sphere develops at least partly from her own predisposition to the unconventional and the uncontained. Clearly Caird wished to stress that English girls, even those unable to travel to Spain or Italy, may step outside ‘the meagre tape-wide track of British Custom’. Interestingly, the more conservative Annie Edwardes makes a comparable point in A Girton Girl; the hot-blooded Marjorie is not the only girl to resist a narrow and conventional life. Dinah’s ‘awakening emotions’ are also nourished throughout the novel. The influence of the younger girl, the warm Guernsey climes, desperation at her pointless existence, dissatisfaction with her husband’s behaviour, and a misunderstanding over letters combine finally to inspire her to plan a separation: ‘“since we have come to this place, I scarce know why, I have awakened. I see my ignorance. I know that I want more than I used to want in life. Gaston—I cannot fall asleep again”’ (GG iii. 207). Dinah’s and Josephine’s inability to lull their awakened consciousnesses back to sleep relates them not only to characters like Caird’s Leonore (or Grand’s Evadne, or Chopin’s Edna) but also to Wormeley’s Amabel and Egerton’s Gertrude. These young women stand at the apex of the conservative and feminist literary traditions, revealing the intersections between the two; indeed, the very real difficulty, for a modern critic, of meaningfully distinguishing between them. In my next chapter I shall explore the political and literary possibilities of young women’s awakenings to disaffected consciousness in more detail. However, in the first instance, it must be established that the notion of insurgent human impulses—particularly those within the exotic other—is imbricated within late Victorian imperialist discourse, and that, situated in this context, its connotations become infinitely less politically and humanly appealing. ‘There is

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almost always a time when the wild beast nature breaks out through the veneer of artificial gentleness which has been inculcated . . .’ remarks the narrator of Evelyn Everett Green’s 1894 girls’ novel, A Difficult Daughter (DD 74), a line which on the one hand describes the inevitable awakening of characters like Josephine and Dinah while, on the other, indicating the imperialist’s fear of the ‘civilized’ barbarian.50 Indeed, Everett Green’s novel deliberately imports the imperialist concept of the insurgent wild beast to characterize— to demonize—women’s political insurrection, tapping into young readers’ fears of imperial decline to persuade them to accept a conventional submissive role.51 Vivian, the heroine, possesses a cheetah which both symbolizes her unruly inner self and represents the dangerous threat within the colonized body. The cheetah, imported from India by Vivian’s brother, is named Zulu, suggesting the author’s profound imperialist indifference (or ignorance) about which peoples came from which colonized territory. Of course, the cheetah’s name also reminds the reader of Britain’s bloody six-month war with the Zulus, which resulted in the formal annexing of Zululand in 1887. The cheetah is thus a palpable imperialist projection of the colonized, one that both suggests Britain’s past success in defeating ‘savage’ races while embodying the colonizer’s fear of future conflicts. For the cheetah soon fulfils the narrator’s prophesy, sinking its fangs into the eyes of a ‘noble’ bloodhound and thus illustrating the impossibility of taming the ‘wild beast nature’. The importance of taming 18-year-old Vivian’s ‘wild beast nature’ is explicitly the focus of the text. When told Vivian is coming for an extended visit, cousin Peggy remarks; ‘“it’s rather like having a wild beast sent over as a present”’ (DD 20). Vivian is the daughter of an English earl, but her physical appearance is coded as racially other: ‘[she is] a most elegant-looking girl, with a dark, gipsy face, the largest, blackest, and most sparkling eyes’ (DD 34). Indeed, rather like Perdita, Vivian seems to have been changed ‘at nurse’; this gipsy50 Evelyn Everett Green, A Difficult Daughter (London: The Sunday School Union, 1894), referenced parenthetically as DD. 51 1894, the year in which Everett Green’s novel was published, saw the publication of a number of key New Woman texts—such as Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, Emma Frances Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman, and Egerton’s Keynotes—and the furore over ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ in Nineteenth Century. This was, in other words, a year of profound concern over women’s political insurrection in general and girls’ ‘revolts’ in particular.

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like girl is strangely out of place in her aristocratic family. Unlike Perdita, Marjorie, and Leonore, however, Vivian lacks clear social ambitions, being merely determined to avoid the conventional rituals and preoccupations of a young woman’s life. She has so far managed to avoid ‘coming out,’ her aunt notes; ‘“I think there was some difficulty with the girl herself about it”’ (DD 13). Vivian’s ‘savage’ proclivities are rendered physically manifest in the form of her unmanageable cheetah. When Zulu tears out the eyes of her bloodhound during a garden-party, Vivian’s cousin Max is forced to break up the bloody battle; the author emphasizes that Max is a powerful, heroic specimen. Being a man ‘of unusual physical strength’, she remarks, he finally ‘succeeded in seizing [Zulu], and getting a hold upon his throat’ (DD 78). If this encounter re-enacts the recent conflict between the British and the Zulus, it also symbolizes the larger battle of the races, stressing that the strong Englishman will inexorably triumph over the colonized beast. Similar scenes may be found in Anglo-Indian novels of the period, incidentally, which typically characterize Indian antagonists as bestial.52 As the cheetah’s dangerous tendencies are revealed, so too the wild and untamed aspects of Vivian’s character become fully apparent. She is enraged when Max orders that her animals must be shot: ‘Her eyes were flashing, her movements were as rapid and fierce as those of a caged animal . . . she swept up and down the limits of the room with all the lithe grace of a panther . . .’ (DD 82–3). Once she has calmed down, she appreciates the parallels herself, discussing ‘wild beasts’ with her cousin: ‘“the wild beast who is dead, and the one who is alive still. Max, don’t you think you could shoot that other one for me too?”’ (DD 97). For Everett Green’s novel emphasizes that the wild beast must be dealt with. If the novel mandates the powerful Englishman to crush the colonized brute, it simultaneously counsels its youthful readership to fight down their inner beast, emphasizing that such forces must not be allowed to disrupt the structure of English society and the future of the empire. Having fallen in love with Max and become influenced by her aunt’s Christian example, therefore, Vivian is reidentified by her uncle at the end of her stay as a ‘“tamed . . . wild bird”’ (DD 287). 52 ‘Aboo was six foot two, as wiry as a panther, as lithe as a serpent’; ‘They wrestle silently to and fro . . . The Englishman, though stabbed in the arm, had succeeded in clutching the convict’s right wrist . . . Aboo, on his side, holds his antagonist in a wolfish grip by the throat . . .’ Bithia Mary Croker, A Bird of Passage, 3 vols. (London: Sampson Law, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886), i. 223–4.

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Yet the message of the novel is not as watertight as Everett Green probably intended. Vivian’s cheetah had to be shot, otherwise the ‘veneer of artificial gentleness’ remains highly suspect. If this stresses that the colonized self is not to be trusted, it also inevitably provides comment on the ending of the text and on Vivian’s new compliance and domesticity. As a wild bird, Vivian is smaller and less dangerous than before. Yet the description retains the sense of her feral nature —and, as the narrator told us, ‘There is almost always a time when the wild beast nature breaks out’. Furthermore, wings express the need to fly: one recalls the miserable gipsy girl, another wild creature who could not be reconciled to a civilized life, left ‘beating her bruised and drooping wings in her narrow cage’. While A Difficult Daughter seeks to tame its heroine’s disruptive nature, the discourse surrounding her experience indicates the inevitability of its resurgence: the imperialist narrative submerged within the text articulates both fear of the ‘wild beast nature’ and also a deep conviction that it may prove unconquerable. This ultimately complicates and even undermines the explicit purpose of Everett Green’s novel: the articulation of Vivian’s unruly impulses as an expression of her ‘wild beast nature’ suggests that they cannot be suppressed. The deep tensions that characterized late Victorian imperialist discourse rendered it curiously flexible: Everett Green could import such a discourse to vilify female insurrection, while a writer like Caird adopted it to legitimize young women’s rebellion. The very title of Caird’s novel, Whom Nature Leadeth, is obviously designed to stress the lure of the untameable, and Caird consistently uses similar images and terms to Everett Green (a decade earlier) for radically different purposes. When, at 17, Leonore is described halfadmiringly by a suitor as a young ‘“savage”’, her stepmother responds by recalling the girl’s maternal Italian heritage. She reads this inheritance as bestial womanhood, fearing a dangerous nature imperfectly contained: ‘“Her mother’s passionate temperament is lying dormant in her; a very little would ignite it”’ (WNL i. 39). This reminds us of Everett Green’s prophesy: like the panther and true to her own heritage, Leonore’s nature inevitably asserts itself. She becomes increasingly and polemically dissatisfied with her limited, constrained life: ‘The force, the insight were within her, importunately demanding liberty, release from bondage; the opportunity, the splendid inspiration, of a free, untrammelled life . . . Ah! How many women, rich and poor, might have echoed those words!’

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(WNL i. 216). The discourse of exotic naturalness may thus be used to authenticate a girl’s desires for employment, higher education, and freedom of action (and it may legitimize a wife’s frustration with the confines of her life). Conversely, a girl’s desires may be terrifying and profoundly disruptive, analogous to the threat of the rebellious, colonized ‘barbarian’. Both modes of representation nevertheless articulate ‘the savage within’ as, in the first place, inescapable; as a deep expression of a girl’s nature. Novels subsequently raise the question of what must happen next; where nature must now lead; where authentic adulthood lies. ‘“You stand riskily on the boundary between two possible futures”’ (WNL iii. 11), remarks Leonore’s soul-mate, Austin Bradley, while Edwardes’s Marjorie gains a vision of the two possible womanhoods before her when she and Geoffrey first kiss: It seemed that she had become, suddenly and distinctly, two persons—one a girl weakly contented, as our grandmothers used to be, at the prospect of husband and home and fireside; the other, a strong-headed, Minerva-like young woman coolly criticising the question of love and marriage from a vantage ground, and liking it ill. Which of the two . . . which was the real, which the artificial Marjorie Bertrand? (GG iii. 43–4)

While Marjorie in the end ‘prove[s] herself a very woman after all’ (GG iii. 298) by giving up Girton and becoming ‘weakly contented’ with Geoffrey, the final stages of Caird’s novel constitute a lengthy debate between Austin and a now-adult Leonore, trapped in a loveless marriage. Austin (recalling John Stuart Mill) rails against the effects on women of what is considered ‘“right and natural . . . according to popular notions”’; ‘“it will cramp you, it will deaden you . . . till you are left at last, worn out and wasted.”’ ‘“Don’t submit to it,”’ he adjures her; ‘“the door of escape lies open to you”’ (WNL iii. 11).53 Distraught, Leonore argues that escape is impossible given the means by which women are enthralled: Tell me in what direction we can move alone, without having so many penalties to pay and to inflict upon our friends, that the most determined spirit may well shrink from the ordeal. People ungenerously bind us through our affections; they clog our footsteps by appealing to our pity; by flinging 53 In The Subjection of Women, Mill famously argued: ‘What is now called the nature of woman is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.’ J. S. Mill and H. T. Mill, The Subjection of Women—Enfranchisement of Women (1869; London: Virago, 1983), 38–9.

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themselves in our path crying, ‘Walk on, if you will, but it must be over our prostrate forms!’ (WNL iii. 9–10)

The period of late girlhood subsequently emerges as one in which the unassimilated individual will be able to resist the ‘narrow cage’ of society most successfully. The girl has choices and comparative freedom; her nature has not yet been stifled by encroaching familial and social demands. Womanhood itself remains incarcerating, for Mona Caird in particular, and she therefore finds it hard to find a way of turning the active, self-determining girl into a happy, successful, selfgoverning adult. Her heroine’s thoughts consequently turn with pain to the future maturation of her own daughters: ‘“sometimes, when I look at [my] children, I wish in my heart that they may never live to cross the threshold of womanhood”’ (WNL iii. 316).

passages to india, passages to womanhood [M]ore than half the Anglo-Indian women in India today [1900] have spent their girlhood and early childhood in the country—which in most cases means that they have been sent Home at the age of seven or thereabouts, returning at seventeen to face the chief business of their lives . . .54

During the 1880s and early 1890s, a new genre of women’s popular fiction began to emerge, which focused on the experiences and travails of young British women in India. The novels frequently open with a girl’s voyage out: the heroine, sent to England as a child but now on the cusp of womanhood, rejoins her family and enters Anglo-Indian society. Most obviously, this plot device reflected the actual colonial practice of sending children away from the perceived dangers of climate and disease until near-adulthood. More figuratively, the girl’s return to India mapped a particular topography on to the concept of ‘coming out’: on leaving school, she embarked on a journey that initiated her role as a marriageable young adult. This rite of passage provided women’s fictions with a metaphor for the process of maturation: the passage to India allowed writers to imagine the transitional phase as a time of travel, action, and excitement. Moreover, Anglo-Indian texts conceived the ‘threshold of woman54 Maud Diver, qtd. in Barr, The Memsahibs, 201. Throughout this section, the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ is taken to mean British expatriates living in India.

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hood’ as a stage with a potentially positive end point: India itself, it is suggested, offered a young Englishwoman unusual and stimulating opportunities for ongoing adventurous freedom. Indeed, even as the texts may be related to a tradition of women’s romance fiction set in Britain, their efforts to imagine new experiences of growth and young adulthood also point to their close affinity to the evolving genre of the New Woman novel. Critical readings of the genre have traditionally taken a different view, treating such novels as unsophisticated stories of romance and marriage. Margaret Stieg, for example, describing what she terms the ‘sub-literature’ of the ‘Indian romance’, claims that such fictions constitute ‘an uneasy amalgam of romance and propaganda’, portraying ‘unselfconsciously’ the era’s moral and social values. They passively reflect both the racist attitudes of the British establishment and its traditional sexist mind-set, she contends, appropriating ‘medieval concepts of chivalry and courtly love. A woman is to be protected, cherished and venerated.’55 More recent critics have begun to modify this approach, recognizing that the texts may also reveal women’s active participation in the shaping of colonialist discourse. As historians and critics have uncovered the Englishwoman’s role as a ‘civilizing’ agent in the imperial project, so too they have recognized that late Victorian British women used imperialism as a means of developing a ‘legitimate’ political role. Women’s abilities to impose order on the domestic sphere and their capacity for moral arbitration emerge as political acts, preserving British claims to moral as well as racial supremacy and thus strengthening imperialism’s apparent raison d’être. Anglo-Indian women’s novels have been seen, by Alison Sainsbury in particular, as contributing to a widespread feminization of imperial discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.56 The heroine who finally becomes a memsahib takes on the rule of the domestic sphere and the servants therein: Sainsbury argues that this endeavour is the focus of the novels, positioning the memsahib’s rule at the heart of the empire and inscribing in microcosm the racial order structuring the Raj. Therefore, she claims, ‘Marriage takes centre stage, not as the 55 Margaret F. Stieg, ‘Indian Romances: Tracts for the Times’, Journal of Popular Culture, 18 (1985), 2–15; 3, 4. 56 Alison Sainsbury, ‘Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel’, in B. J. Moore-Gilbert (ed.), Writing India, 1757–1900: The Literature of British India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 163–87.

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desired goal or inevitable future of a young girl, but as the warp onto which the weft of the fabric of empire should be woven.’57 Sainsbury recognizes that the heroines’ maturation forms an important feature of the plots, but she argues that girls’ development is hijacked for narrowly political purposes, channelling text and reader towards an acceptance of imperial beliefs. ‘The trope of a “journey to knowledge” enables a false inductivism’, she argues: ‘difference is naturalised—empirically observed—and then invoked to explain and justify the imperialist position.’58 However, girls’ journeys out and through India may in fact be dramatic and thought-provoking, figuring and facilitating an active, stimulating, and distinctively unorthodox transition to womanhood. Indeed, representations of girls’ desires for independence and agency in youth and for selfdetermination in adulthood clearly demonstrate the texts’ kinship with contemporary feminist writing. The sense of Anglo-Indian women’s texts as in some sense ‘progressive’ is of course implicit in Sainsbury’s account: she emphasizes that they evolved to help reconceive women’s position, to create a new space for women as British citizens and as actors on a world stage.59 However, while Sainsbury emphasizes the ways in which Anglo-Indian texts worked to con57 Ibid. 183. There is little consensus about what to call the growing number of novels published from the 1880s onwards and set in British India. Bhupal Singh discusses ‘novels of Anglo-Indian life’, Benita Parry calls them ‘romantic novelettes’, Margaret Stieg talks about ‘Anglo-Indian Romances’ while Sainsbury terms them ‘Anglo-Indian domestic novels’. (In A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930 (London: Allen Lane, 1972); ‘Indian Romances’, and ‘Married to the Empire’ respectively. See also Sainsbury’s useful evaluative discussion of these terms, 164–6.) As will become clear, the novels discussed have a range of settings, plots, and outcomes, but they share a female protagonist and a central concern with female subjective experience. They are also clearly indebted to women’s popular fictions set in Britain, using familiar themes and plot twists. In the context of this book, therefore, it seems appropriate to term them ‘women’s novels’. 58 Sainsbury, ‘Married to the Empire’, 178. 59 In this section, I suggest that the novels are in some sense ‘progressive’; this claim is of course heavily qualified by the fact that unorthodox responses to established gender policies did not lead to substantive criticism of Britain’s imperialist agenda. Antoinette Burton has emphasized that this apparent conflict characterized the fin de siècle British feminist movement also—indeed, that many feminists adopted the notion of woman as imperial agent with positive gusto: ‘A strong sense of female superiority combined readily with other assumptions of imperial supremacy to make British feminists conceive of “the Anglo-Saxon woman” as the saviour of her race, not to mention as the highest female type.’ Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and “The Indian Woman”, 1865–1915’, in Chaudhuri and Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism, 137–57; 138.

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struct a political role for adult women within the imperialist establishment, she is less conscious of the contribution they made to debates about the importunate inner life. The genre evolved partly to figure young women’s socially unorthodox needs and ambitions, as this section will demonstrate.60 This is not to deny that these stories of female experience in AngloIndia contributed to the reconception of women as imperial agents, or that the novels are dangerously complicit with imperialism, although I shall argue that texts may reveal more ambivalence about both these projects than Sainsbury suggests. However, early AngloIndian narratives also incorporate, even depend upon, surprisingly progressive polemic about young girls’ need to escape Britain and its repressive social mores. This fundamental thematic preoccupation with discontent crucially complicates the novels’ status, situating them not only within imperialist discourse, but also within both long-standing and more recently conceived debates about the future and condition of women. Anglo-Indian women’s fiction and New Woman writing took shape at approximately the same time. Bithia Mary Croker’s Proper Pride, the first Anglo-Indian women’s novel I have found, was published in 1882, while Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm and Caird’s Whom Nature Leadeth appeared in 1883.61 Moreover, echoes of more obviously radical contemporary writings resonate in early Anglo-Indian novels. For instance, the narratives often open with strikingly outspoken expressions of frustration at the restraints experienced during girlhood. Alice Perrin’s 1894 novel, Into Temptation, which emphasizes the heroine’s overwhelming desire for liberty during her late teens, is a case in point. Josephine was sent to an Anglo-Indian school in London when she was 4, but has always longed for the day when she can return to the land of her birth: To go out to India had been the one event which I had longed for all my life with an intensity only known to myself, for I could but dimly remember any existence before I was put under Miss Stogden’s charge, and the even 60 Sainsbury does emphasize that Anglo-Indian texts achieved a ‘rearticulation of [women’s] subjectivity’ (168). However, she reads them as creating ultimately ‘one subject position: a female imperial citizen’ (181), while I argue that the novels were engaged in articulating diverse positions. 61 As Ardis has pointed out, it is extremely difficult to identity ‘a single point of origin’, ‘an Ur-text’, since New Woman literature was profoundly heterogeneous (Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 31).

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monotony, and dull routine of the long years, had chafed and fretted me even more than I myself had realized at the time. (Into Temptation, i. 3)62

Josephine associates India with freedom, and with adulthood. Aged nearly 19, she thinks the waiting is over, and she dreams of the return to India as the beginning of her adult life: ‘I was already long past the age when most girls had left school and “come out,” and at last, in reply to incessant entreaties on my part to my parents to be allowed to take my place in the world, the summons had come . . .’ (IT i. 3). However, Josephine’s parents die before she can leave for India, leaving her and her brother in poverty. In desperation, she becomes engaged to the vile Mr Boscawen, a man whose appeal rests almost entirely in the nature of his employment—he works for the Indian Civil Service. She is revolted by his caresses: ‘an awful thing happened. Mr Boscawen kissed me. I did not like it at all.’ Indeed, she is even more disgusted when he tries a second time: ‘I felt as if I must scream aloud when he passed his hand over my hair and tried to kiss me again’ (IT i. 58, 59–60). But while the girl is frozen with sexual disgust, her desire for India remains potent and all-encompassing: ‘presently I forgot this feeling, for he began to talk of India . . . till I almost longed for the fortnight to be up, and the old craving to get away into the world began to rush over me again so forcibly as to stifle all other feelings’ (IT i. 60). Like her overtly feminist contemporaries, Perrin highlights a young girl’s desire to participate in the public sphere, explores the predicament of sexual revulsion, and, in the rest of the novel, examines the psychological strain endured by a woman trapped in a distressfully mismatched marriage. Similar themes structure seminal New Woman texts, of course: one thinks most immediately of Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus. Scenes of a misunderstood girl straining at the leash are also present in the very earliest Anglo-Indian domestic fictions. In Bithia Mary Croker’s Pretty Miss Neville (1883), for example, Irish Nora O’Neill travels to India under a pseudonym to escape her overbearing guardian and a forced engagement. This energetic tomboy is an early instantiation of the ‘New Girl’: self-assured and proactive, Nora is the kind of heroine found everywhere on the pages of fin de siècle girls’ magazines like the Girl’s Own Paper, Atalanta (first published 62 Alice Perrin, Into Temptation, 2 vols. (London: F. V. White, 1894), hereafter referenced parenthetically as IT.

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in 1887), and Girl’s Realm (1898). As a child, she is praised for her unusual physical ability by her best friend, Rody, whose naïve admiration of his young companion tacitly criticizes conservative codes of gender: ‘“You are a first-rater in your way—good runner, climber, and I’ll back you to throw stones, against any fellow I know. You ought to have been a boy”’ (Pretty Miss Neville, i. 6).63 To bring Nora’s nonconformity into even sharper relief, Croker also borrows George Eliot’s scheme of contrasting a rebellious heroine with a blonde, pretty, and demure playmate: Lucy Deane is reincarnated in Pretty Miss Neville as Deb French. While Deb seems to grow from childhood straight into ladyhood—‘She was as wellfavoured as of yore, and quite the young lady now, in her neat winter dress, fur coat, and felt hat’—Nora develops all the awkwardness of early adolescence. At nearly 14, she is ‘as gawky and long-legged as ever . . . I was never well dressed, but always looked a romp and a hoyden, in my battered blue serge, miles too short in the sleeves, and too tight in the skirt’ (PMN i. 62–3). Deb (like Lucy) accepts the mantle of dutiful Victorian womanhood with ease: Nora the misfit, meanwhile, is unable to achieve the transition to orthodox maturity. She erupts into open rebellion in her late teens, informing her autocratic guardian, Mr French, that she wants to go ‘“Out into the world to seek my fortune”’. Croker’s narrator, the adult Nora, invites our amusement at the girl’s self-importance with gentle selfirony: ‘“I am seventeen, and I know my own mind . . . I am no longer a child—I am grown up,” I added impressively’ (PMN i. 186, 187). But Mr French’s dampening response nevertheless encourages the reader’s sympathy for this energetic, wayward heroine. ‘“A girl in her teens has no business to have a will”’, he remarks, before concluding that ‘“Your independence must be curbed”’ (PMN i. 187–8, 188). Faced with such repressive guardianship, Nora (like Josephine) projects India as the best means of achieving an emancipated adulthood, and she consequently persuades Anglo-Indian relatives to arrange her passage. Josephine and Nora’s characterization of India marks them as ‘girls of their period’. For if we look outside Anglo-Indian texts, we see that India apparently occupied just this position in (middle- and upper-class) British girls’ cultural imagination. As we have seen, 63 Bithia Mary Croker, Pretty Miss Neville, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1883), hereafter referenced parenthetically as PMN.

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advice texts and magazines from the late 1870s onwards suggested that girls were finding their late teenage years frustratingly unstructured. A debate running through the Girl’s Own Paper in the later part of the 1880s indicates that some girls were taking Isabel Reaney’s advice and looking to Indian service to employ their time and fulfil their talents. In 1881, a contributor named Mary Selwood expressed her conviction that girls would find a paper on Indian missionary work boring: ‘I fear that more than one girl who takes up this paper will be inclined to pass over an article with such a heading as having no interest for them.’64 However, Selwood was quickly proved wrong: the paper received numerous enquiries on the subject, to the editors’ increasing distress. One girl who wrote to ask about missionary training was strongly rebuked in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ section: ‘D.W. will find endless replies in our correspondence columns giving the several addresses of colleges for teaching students Zenana work . . . We must request that all further inquirers for training for missionary work refer to this list, as we decline repeating our replies any longer.’65 By the end of the decade the editors were thoroughly annoyed: A.S.O.E.—If you really desired information as to the qualifications required in a Zenana missionary, and the steps to be taken by a competitor for such an appointment, you would have spent half an hour in looking through our multitudinous answers to similar questions under the above heading. One or two qualifications essential in a missionary you certainly have not got, i.e., good temper, good manners, and patience.66

The editors were clearly frustrated by the wealth of interest in mission work, and the caustic nature of their reply may well stem from a fear that girls were misusing such employment for selfinterested ends. Indeed, the connection between the desire to proselytize and the desire to achieve independence became absolutely explicit in a Girl’s Own Paper article from the early 1890s. Sophia F. A. Caulfield, in identifying contemporary ‘crazes’ amongst women of the period, associated the impulse to become a missionary with other subversive desires of the New Woman. Girls of the period, she feared, wanted ‘to be masculine in appearance and pursuits; to be 64 Mary Selwood, ‘Girls’ Work in the Mission Field. I: In India’, Girl’s Own Paper, 3 (1881–2), 54–5; 54. 65 ‘Answers to Correspondents’, Girl’s Own Paper, 7 (1885–6), 79–80; 79. 66 ‘Answers to Correspondents’, Girl’s Own Paper, 10 (1888–9), 768.

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poets; or to be nurses, or to be missionaries’. Consequently, Caulfield struggled to reinscribe the importance of Christian goals in missionary work: Have not a desire for adventure and love of variety, restlessness under the restrictions of home authority, and the monotony of the little daily round of home duties, a large share amongst the influences that have developed such an ambition? . . . Pray to be guided by Him, and to subdue all personal considerations, before you presume to number yourself as one of the noble army of missionaries in heart as well as in name and deed.67

The novels discussed here focus exclusively on entering India through family ties or by marriage; missionary work itself is not represented. Nevertheless, these magazine articles indicate that young women of the 1880s and 1890s did indeed dream that India presented possibilities for greater freedom of action; that India could be a means of satisfying ‘the old craving to get away into the world’. And the novels are predicated upon this idea: the country is projected as a means of achieving freedom and an active, stimulating life. India’s potential to liberate and to excite is usually realized most graphically during the voyage out. For the passage to India forms a striking hiatus: the ship’s deck functions as a transitional space which is (to varying degrees) free from conventional British constraints. As a stage marking the girl’s own transition to womanhood, the voyage allows an unusual experience, a kind of ‘coming out’ that would not, could not be available in Britain. For example, the voyage allows girls to encounter strange people in unconventional circumstances. Thus Minnie Beaumont, second heroine of Fanny Emily Penny’s Caste and Creed (1890), makes a new acquaintance when the rolling of the steamer propels her into a young gentleman’s back. Normal social rules must be jettisoned on board a tossing ship: after Minnie loses her balance a second time, Percy Bell offers his arm. ‘Minnie hesitated for a moment, as the question of the propriety of walking with a stranger crossed her mind. But, the rolling motion recommencing, she grasped his arm in self-preservation, and, smiling at Mrs Stainer, she continued her morning walk with her new cavalier’ (Caste and Creed, i. 60).68 This is a relatively benign example of the impact of the voyage on a young girl, however: in Croker’s 67

‘Some Types of Girlhood: III’, Girl’s Own Paper, 12 (1890–1), 244–6. Fanny Emily Penny, Caste and Creed, 2 vols. (London: F. V. White, 1890), hereafter referenced parenthetically as C&C. 68

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Pretty Miss Neville, Nora’s life is threatened. Her passage to India is conspicuously arrested when the steamer runs aground and sinks in the Bay of Biscay, killing all but eleven of the passengers. Nora herself survives by a whisker: another ship hoves into view just as she is about to drown. The highly dramatic scenes surrounding Nora’s near-death experience certainly contribute (what Caulfield termed) ‘adventure and . . . variety’ to the heroine’s life: they also endow the voyage with a sense of enormity, emphasizing the contrast between her new life and her safe yet limited existence in Gallow. Nora’s passage is one in which her physical resilience is reemphasized and retested. We saw her abilities to climb and throw as a child: the catastrophic voyage proves her stamina. This prepares her more fully, of course, for the life of a memsahib, struggling to cope with an alien climate and environment.69 In other words, Nora’s rebellion ultimately fits her for a role which is, to our eyes, rooted within Victorian cultural orthodoxy. This explains Sainsbury’s rejection of the notion of an authentic ‘journey to knowledge’ in such texts, of course, since the plot channels the heroine away from a searching, dissident position towards an appropriation of a colonizer’s role. However, the position of memsahib may also be taken by young heroines as an act of defiance; as a means of evading the limited options for womanhood available in Britain. This interpretation reads the choice as a rejection of orthodoxy, rather than as a resolution to draft oneself into the heart of the establishment. In this light, it is worth noting that Anglo-Indian women writers do not always adopt colonialist perspectives unreflectingly: the position taken by such authors—a position that is on one level set against the establishment—may lead to criticism of deeply held imperialist attitudes. Such progressive cultural examinations are again typically held during the unconventional phase of the voyage out.70 Penny’s Caste and Creed profoundly unsettles contemporary beliefs about race during the passage to India. The greatest source of interest is Zelma, the half-Indian, half-Scottish protagonist of the novel who, as a 69 Contemporary accounts, as Rashna B. Singh points out, deprecated India ‘for its climate, its unhealthiness, its dirt and discomfort’. Singh, The Imperishable Empire: A Study of British Fiction on India (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988), 52. 70 Obviously, the voyage was not a period of total emancipation from conventional British social mores. However, the novels consistently emphasize that the society formed on board ship did not conform to normal social standards. Unusual relationships were formed and more daring behaviour tolerated.

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child, was sent to England by her father to separate her from her Indian mother. Now, aged 18, she is travelling out to take up her position as a young lady in Anglo-Indian society. Zelma is accompanied on the journey by her English friend Minnie, who is about to start a new life with her aunt and uncle. The unconventional nature of ship society provides the context for a discussion about racial characteristics which, initiated by Minnie and Percy, runs throughout the rest of the voyage. Just as social conventions may be overturned on board ship, so deeply held assumptions about race may also be disturbed. Minnie is nettled by Percy’s repugnance to her friend’s mixed racial heritage (as yet he has not met Zelma, who is confined to bed with seasickness), for Percy is certain she will ‘“have all the failings of her race, which no amount of education can eradicate”’ (C&C i. 65–6). Yet the peculiarities of ship life force Percy to examine his stereotypes. Percy, a magistrate, has argued that he can read Indians through their bodies: ‘“Their tongues do not [tell the truth]; but whilst they lie so glibly, I read the truth in other signs . . . I watch their hands and their feet”’ (C&C i. 63). However, he is drawn to an attractive young woman on board ship without realizing that she is Zelma. (Normally, of course, the two would have been formally introduced.) When Percy finally discovers her identity, he is shocked by his previous inability to distinguish her racial heritage: ‘His judgment for once had been wrong; he had been deceived; yes, selfdeceived by appearances; for, with all his penetration, he had failed to detect the East Indian element in her’ (C&C i. 86–7). As we have seen, Kipling’s short story ‘Kidnapped’ suggests that, to ‘innocent people at Home’, Indian physical characteristics may be mistaken for Spanish: Percy’s anger potentially stems from the fact that he has made the mistake of an ignorant Briton, rather than a seasoned Anglo-Indian. He maintains his belief that there must be some trait which can be detected by the initiate, rather as Kipling’s narrator stresses that experienced memsahibs can distinguish the tiniest physical feature: ‘All good Mammas know what “impossible” means. It was obviously absurd that Peythroppe should marry her. The little opal-tinted onyx at the base of her finger-nails said this as plainly as print.’71 Penny’s novel questions the intelligibility of racial characteristics 71

Kipling, ‘Kidnapped’, 98.

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by emphasizing that Percy’s best efforts to uncover evidence of Zelma’s ‘taint’ are continually frustrated. Although he is convinced that there must at least be some psychological mark of inferior race, and persists in applying the tactics culled from his job to Zelma, she continues to undermine his view of ‘the Indian character’: He watched her closely with an eagerness he was ashamed of, hoping and fearing at the same time to find those very traits he considered were the blemish of her race. He interested himself in her daily doings, expecting to hear that she slept and idled half the day away; he was disappointed and pleased to learn that she led a far more busy life than her friend Minnie. He noted her liking for jewels, and congratulated himself upon having discovered one Oriental feature in her character; but again he was astonished when he noted her disregard for dress . . . Minnie, on the contrary, would appear in three or four different costumes in the day. (C&C i. 89)

Percy is baffled. Having told Minnie so confidently that he is trained to ‘read human nature’, he discovers that Zelma is a text he cannot interpret (C&C i. 62). Expecting her race to signify idle and disorganized behaviour, he discovers almost a reversal of his system of signs and significations through Zelma’s careful self-occupation and Minnie’s more luxurious lifestyle. While the author later tries to undermine the suggestive discourse she has initiated by reiterating the weakness of Indian people and reaffirming the morality of imperialism, the voyage out nevertheless encourages the reader (like Percy) to re-evaluate standard English racial characterizations. Indeed, Penny complicates the seemingly absolute distinction between colonial subject and colonizer by representing Zelma as the ideal natural girl, the apogee of what Britons should aspire to become. Zelma, Penny suggests, has a truly authentic core, a centre of integrity that is distinctively non-English and rarely comprehended by British observers. Indeed, as the voyage progresses, Zelma turns into a compelling critic of English culture. While her unconscious behaviour undermines stereotypes of the Indian character, her accounts of her fraught experiences at school direct attention to the potentially enervating effects of English education—and, indeed, to the inadequacies of the modern English character. For Zelma is thrilled to escape the ‘cold heavy stone of English common sense and propriety’ which had, she felt, been imposed upon her (C&C i. 50). Once away from the warping effects of English schooling (‘“I feel pruned and trimmed down to an un-

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natural shape”’), she is revitalized by the sun’s warmth: ‘“I have been gradually awakening out of a cold, dead dream into a new life. It was the sun I wanted, the glorious golden light, with its life-giving rays”’ (C&C i. 93, 101). Obviously, this depiction of Zelma is indebted to racist imperialist discourse about the potentially noble Indian ‘savage’. Yet it must also be located within a Victorian women’s tradition of characterizing socially resistant girls as non-English, specifically ‘southern’. Indeed, Penny emphasizes that Zelma’s character is shaped not only by her Indian heritage but also, more generally, by the enabling effects of a southern climate. Zelma, a ‘child of the South’, should not have been brought up in a northern country, Percy argues: ‘“Italy would have made you a far more congenial home . . . Surely a school could have been found for you in sunny France, or warmhearted Italy”’ (C&C i. 105). The kinship between India and Italy is clearly literary as well as climatic and geographic; Penny’s portrayal of India (like Caird’s portrayal of southern Europe) owes much to Barrett Browning’s depiction of Italy in Aurora Leigh. Barrett Browning and Penny both represent their heroines’ birthplace as a place of freedom and relative liberty, and both register the deadening, ‘measured’ life of a woman in England, the ‘quiet life, which was not life at all’ (Aurora Leigh, i. 364, 289). The heroines of both texts have mixed parentage, and both present the girls’ mothers as the conduit for a freer and more authentic psychology, for what Penny calls a more ‘warm-hearted untutored emotion’ (C&C i. 106). In fact, both girls arguably relate themselves to their mother’s country rather than to their father’s: Aurora’s father is characterized as ‘an austere Englishman’ and Zelma’s as a ‘precise, judicial’ Scot (Aurora Leigh, i. 65). The half-Indian girl feels that her Scottish paternal character is hindering the more natural, intuitive responsiveness inherited from her mother: ‘“As long as I live I shall feel my father’s calculating nature dogging the footsteps of my mother’s impulsive emotion”’ (C&C i. 106).72 The two texts display their kinship even more expressly in their use of parallel awakening scenes. Aurora and Zelma both embrace the natural world in England during an epiphanic girlhood moment. The poet describes a moment in which young Aurora (true to her name) 72 Note, though, that while still at school, Zelma identifies herself with her paternal inheritance: ‘“I feel as if I belonged to my father and his country, and that my mother is a foreigner. I am British by education, and not Indian” ’ (C&C i. 47).

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wakes up spiritually and physically, stimulated by the beauty of an early morning: . . . Then, I wakened up More slowly than I verily write now, But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide The window and my soul, and let the airs And outdoor sights sweep gradual gospels in, Regenerating what I was.

‘Soon,’ she continues: I used to get up early, just to sit And watch the morning quicken in the gray, And hear the silence open like a flower Leaf after leaf . . . (Aurora Leigh, i. 661–5, 680–4)

In Caste and Creed, the 15-year-old Zelma also experiences an early and incomplete awakening while still at school. Again, this experience is both compounded and facilitated by the view from her window one night: It was a warm night in summer, and the air was hot and close . . . Tossing and restless, she wooed sleep in vain. Her brain was on fire with the awakening of her soul within her. Her heaving breast was filled with new and strange longings. She felt suffocated within the four walls, and ardently desired to escape; to throw off all fettering proprieties . . . Impelled by she knew not what, she got up and softly opened the window . . . Zelma was suddenly overwhelmed with a great wave of memory. She saw the palm-trees of her Eastern home; the fire-flies dancing in the frond-like leaves . . . She fancied she could smell the waxen blossoms of the pagoda-tree that used to grow beneath her bedroom window, and waft their heavy scent on the night air. (C&C i. 50–1)

Aurora’s peaceful garden scene is transformed here into Zelma’s vision of exotic India, but both views of nature facilitate selfunderstanding. Aurora subsequently catches herself ‘Smiling for joy’, and she goes on to spend more time in her ‘chamber green’, reading and thinking freely (Aurora Leigh, i. 688, 698). Zelma only partially understands her experiences, although they do initiate a powerful if transitory change: ‘As she thought of all these things, her eyes grew luminous, her lips parted, and she was like a transformed being’ (C&C i. 51).

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Penny’s representation of ‘the awakening of [Zelma’s] soul within her’, her ‘new and strange longings’, and her desperate desire ‘to throw off all fettering proprieties’ also borrows the kinds of terms New Women writers were evolving at this time to portray the painful conflict between society’s requirements and a young woman’s inner, inescapable needs. The most famous New Woman texts did not appear until the mid-1890s: Caird’s Whom Nature Leadeth, however, was published some eight years before Caste and Creed. The resemblances between the two novels are intriguing: as Zelma is liberated from the ‘cold heavy stone of English common sense and propriety’ by her voyage into the sun, so Caird’s Josephine is freed (as we have seen) from ‘the meagre tape-wide track of British Custom’ by ‘the country, and the skies, and all the warm, free picturesqueness of the South’ during a trip to the Riviera. Caird’s novel is centrally concerned with the trauma experienced by a girl with ‘southern’ ancestry who is forced to conform to English social dictates: like Zelma and Aurora, Leonore feels animated by the natural world: ‘The wild freedom of Nature roused her true instincts’; ‘The force, the insight were within her, importunately demanding liberty, release from bondage; the opportunity, the splendid inspiration, of a free, untrammelled life’ (WNL i. 216). Caste and Creed may therefore be related to a corpus of fin de siècle literature that utilized the correlation between woman, nature, and the south, forged so profitably by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the middle of the century, to articulate and justify young women’s extra-social needs. Penny’s representation of India needs to be understood in this broader context—that is to say, it is important to recognize that Spanish and Italian inheritances (not to mention gipsydom) were identified with Indian ancestry and with one another as indicative of a mode of femininity that was intuitive and authentic, unconventional and happily unEnglish. This is not to say that Penny’s representation of the country is anything less than racist; Caste and Creed works hard to defend colonialism and, to that end, Zelma’s deep sensitivity to nature finally renders her an inadequate memsahib. Viewed ultimately as excessively attuned to the natural world and her private needs, Zelma is seen to lack the ability to identify herself with a memsahib’s public duties. The rest of the novel, therefore, concentrates on detaching Zelma from her race and attacking her Indianness: the text emphasizes that, as an adult, she must learn to reject her intuitiveness and adopt a more ‘rational’ (read English)

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perspective before she is finally free, at the end of the story, to work ‘“for India’s good”’ (C&C ii. 205). The need to separate Zelma from her Indian heritage is worked out most fully through her relationship with her mother. Mrs Anderson, of course, is no memsahib: an Indian rather than a British woman, she has never been integrated into Anglo-Indian society. Her marriage to Zelma’s father was not a success and, by the time Zelma rejoins her parents, they are married in name alone. Mrs Anderson lacks any public political role: dominated by a rapacious brother, ignored by her husband, she is characterized as a sensual woman in whom nature has run unchecked. Thus while Zelma longs to love her mother, Penny emphasizes that she is conscious of differences between them at their very first meeting: ‘Looking at the strange figure before her, Zelma found it difficult to believe that she could be her mother. At present she could find nothing that they shared in common . . .’ (C&C i. 172). By the end of the novel, Mrs Anderson has become a hysterical projection of racist anxiety, an embodiment of Indian barbarism. Zelma’s mother and uncle aim to woo Zelma back to their religion, and they lure the (moderately receptive) girl to an orgiastic ceremony. In this huge set-piece, Mrs Anderson appears as a squalid, bestial figure: ‘her face was smeared with the sacred ashes and pigment; her eyes burned with . . . fanatical madness . . . She stood before her daughter the very embodiment of idolatrous superstition and heathenism. With a shudder Zelma turned from her and clung to Percy’ (C&C i. 182–3). Zelma’s English Christian upbringing resurfaces, and the girl is righteously revolted by the sensuality and savagery of her mother’s family. The reader is clearly expected to have similar feelings of repugnance, to cling with relief to the strong British Percy, who calls in ‘ringing tones’: ‘“She is Christian by birth! She belongs to her father and to us”’ (C&C ii. 180). For if the image of Mrs Anderson smeared in oil represents the bestial side of India, it represents also the animalistic side of natural woman, and Zelma, with her exceptional responsiveness to nature, must be saved from exposure to such a model (particularly because her rational Scottish father has just died). Thus Percy, who decides to marry the chastened Zelma, insists on separating her both from her mother and from India itself: ‘“I shall remove her from everything connected with her mother. She shall rise to better things on the memory of her dead father”’ (C&C ii. 204).

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The emotional trajectory traced here (from excitement at the possibilities of India, to disillusionment at its savagery) is widespread in early Anglo-Indian women’s novels, irrespective of the heroine’s ethnicity.73 Anglo-Indian novels initially suggest a return to Eden—a modification of the garden of Eden narrative, as it were—to articulate heroines’ desires for freedom and for the unregimented exercise of ‘natural’ desires. Inherent within the garden of Eden narrative, however, is the fact that Eden cannot be re-entered; there is no possibility of return.74 Young women’s ensuing distaste and disillusionment tends, in the first place, to be directed at India rather than at the imperial endeavour: this clearly heightens the novels’ commitment to colonialism and their endorsement of imperialist notions of the inadequacies of India. For example, Croker’s Nora, having visualized India as a garden of exotic plenty (‘[I was convinced that] pineapples, guavas, oranges, and mangoes . . . grew in wild luxuriance, and everywhere, and at all times and seasons’), is horrified to discover that she is the consumed rather than the consumer, the viewed rather than the viewer: ‘The only things that really came up to and surpassed my expectations so far were the mosquitoes. Their activity, voracity, and pertinacity knew no bounds . . . [They] banqueted heartily on my face and hands, and rendered me a deplorable spectacle’ (PMN ii. 10). However, the colonialist interpretation of India as a ‘false promise’ also parallels and accentuates the fact that the country did not, could not, satisfy a girl’s every dream and aspiration—that her ambitions for the future were likely to remain unfulfilled. In A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster famously claimed that India refused to make its possibilities tangible: ‘India . . . calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.’75 Anglo-Indian women’s novels, also about the call to ‘Come’, suggest that if India provided a means of imagining an answer to young women’s problems, it did not offer a lasting or realistic solution. This conclusion is developed in Anglo-Indian women’s novels as 73 As we have seen, women’s novels set in Britain also typically open with a sense of excitement and possibility, which is succeeded by disillusionment and distaste at the limited opportunities of adulthood. 74 Genesis 3: 24: ‘So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’ 75 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; London: Penguin, 1989), 149.

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disenchantment with the Indian landscape is quickly succeeded by disgust and disappointment at Anglo-Indian society. Croker’s Nora loses the resilience and resourcefulness of her early youth when she discovers that British India offers no more opportunities for a young woman than Britain itself. Pretty Miss Neville thus becomes increasingly conventional in literary terms, reflecting the fact that the plot of a woman’s life in British India followed essentially the same trajectory as in Britain itself. Nora, lacking a proper guardian or means of support, allows herself to be persuaded into an engagement with a man she loathes (novels with this plot include Sylvan Holt’s Daughter, The Morals of Mayfair, and Phemie Keller, of course). Nearly losing the man she truly loves, Nora is only saved by the discovery that her fiancé has written love-letters to someone else. Increasingly, she becomes a passive rather than an active woman; the focus of someone else’s will, rather than a free agent. Croker’s novel, seemingly addressed to a host of readers who dreamed that a trip out to the colony would solve (what Caulfield termed) ‘a desire for adventure and love of variety, [a] restlessness under the restrictions of home authority’, suggests that the memsahib’s apparent opportunities for freedom and agency were compromised as long as her social contribution remained confined to domestic and romantic pursuits; the very familiarity of the story that unfolds in the later stages of the text, the increasing loss of narrative innovation as Nora grows up, makes this point concrete. Alison Sainsbury has argued that private and domestic action gained political meaning in an imperial space because conventional gendered structures were in disarray. ‘[S]eparate spheres in the colonial context was a contradictory construct’, she argues: ‘in AngloIndia, what was private was public, and Anglo-Indian women’s lives were organised and ruled by the fact that they lived as part of the ruling British enclave in India.’76 Yet Sainsbury’s evaluation of this ideological shift reveals that the reconception of public and private spheres, while open to manipulation by women, was in the first place imposed upon them: the repeated use of the word ‘ruled’ stresses that traditional gender relations were inexorably imbricated within imperialism (as the heroines, of course, discover). In other words, the entangling of private and public in an imperial domain does not of itself challenge women’s subjected position, since it fails to address the 76

Sainsbury, ‘Married to the Empire’, 169.

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ideological issues behind the original separation of the spheres (namely, the opposition of masculine strength and feminine dependence). It also contrives to reiterate women’s potential for ‘influence’ through domestic activity, hardly a new phenomenon in the Victorian rhetoric of gender. The Anglo-Indian heroines in the novels under discussion consequently become disillusioned when they discover that little, after all, has changed; that they are subject to the same notions of familybound femininity in Anglo-India as in Britain. Critics have failed to recognize the potent narratives of anger, dissatisfaction, and social censure within these novels, not to mention the wearying sameness, the sense of literary cliché, that develops when the texts find themselves unable to project a genuinely new vision of a young woman’s life (indeed, this aspect of the novels can only surface when the fictions are set in the broader context of women’s literature in the nineteenth century). Sainsbury in particular has provided a sensitive reading of the genre’s contribution to the feminization of imperialist discourse, but even she has missed the novels’ ability to articulate a spectrum of emotions, from politically contentious hopes and ambitions to excitement, and then to disillusionment, frustration, and disgust. The novels’ basic commitment to imperialism and to imperialist attitudes has perhaps encouraged critics to stress the novels’ wholesale political orthodoxy, their commitment to—if desire to reshape—Victorian discourses of power. In fact the novels may reveal some ambivalence about imperialist attitudes; they often resist and critique conventional British ideals of womanhood. Anglo-Indian writers, like so many authors of women’s romances in the nineteenth century, regularly give voice to young heroines’ desires for change, for liberty, for escape. And, rather than cheerfully embracing the memsahib’s opportunities for public action and imperial service, rather than describing her life as the happy fulfilment of a girl’s desires, texts ultimately present the memsahib’s role as, at most, the best of a bad deal.77 The novels may therefore be situated within a wider female project, at the fin de siècle, of searching beyond the ‘meagre tape-wide track of British Custom’ and seeking out a larger sphere of action— 77 Vron Ware has pointed out that some British women (such as Josephine Butler) supported Indian feminism, recognizing ‘that any demand for change in women’s status had to be linked to the emerging nationalist movement’. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992), 164.

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for women as well as for girls. Indeed, even as India’s avenues for freedom are closed down, the desire to look around once more, the drive to search beyond that country for new opportunities—for a way to achieve self-determining adulthood—surfaces occasionally in the early Anglo-Indian women’s novel. It is here, perhaps, that texts most closely approach the values articulated by New Women. By the end of Into Temptation Mr Boscawen has died, and Josephine has fallen deeply in love with Walter Pierce, an eminently respectable, caring man. However, Pierce wants to marry her immediately and Josephine, having been left a substantial amount of money by her first husband, is keen to embark upon a lengthy period of independent travel. She asks her beloved for a year’s grace to choose, but he says no. Faced, now, with the choice between a loving marriage and independence, Josephine decides on travel, and rejects Walter: ‘there was a wild excitement surging in my blood . . . I burned to get away.’ Josephine, exhilarated by the danger, will go out into the world on her own: I looked vacantly out over the glittering sea as I compared [the paths] in my mind—the one so quiet, smooth and safe, protected by the strong love of a good man; the other, perhaps stormy and dangerous, beset with snares and temptations, but sparkling and seductive, full of attractions and excitement—full of life. The latter was the path I had chosen. Where would it lead me in the end? (IT ii. 222–3)

5

On the threshold Female Adolescent Experience in Fiction of the Fin de Siècle introduction In the general movement of the century no one factor has, as a whole, made such an important stride as the Educated Woman, and simultaneously a class has been developed which was practically non-existent before, namely, that of so-called ‘girls’ between the ages of eighteen and thirty. In old times the maiden who but yesterday attained to years of discretion became the bride of to-day . . . girlhood as apart from childhood had neither been reckoned with nor provided for. Now, all this is changed . . . the great majority of girls have five or six years of adolescence before them ere they assume the responsibilities of marriage . . .1

Edith Lyttelton Gell’s claim that ‘girlhood’ was an 1890s phenomenon is clearly more polemical than precise: a range of writers, fictional and non-fictional, responded to and described a distinctive interim phase between childhood and womanhood in the nineteenth century, as we have seen. Gell’s article signals a new development, however, because while earlier writers struggled to find the words to describe female maturation, Gell specifically uses the term ‘adolescence’. The increased use of this word at the fin de siècle corresponds to the evolution of a more detailed theory of youth development, articulated at length in G. Stanley Hall’s influential Adolescence (1904) and further explored in the work of Sigmund Freud.2 Gell 1 Edith Lyttelton Gell, ‘Squandered Girlhood’, Nineteenth Century, 32 (1892), 930–7; 930. 2 See, in particular, ‘The Transformations of Puberty’ (1905): for analyses of female sexual development see ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ (1920) and ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931).

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herself defines adolescence as essentially a social stage, a period ending at the contract of marriage; it is, therefore, effectively mapped on to previous definitions of girlhood. However, Gell’s account nevertheless articulates an important new approach to girlhood, for she associates the evolution of the adolescent girl with developments in women’s education and their changing condition—perhaps even, tacitly, with the rise of that anti-establishment figure, the New Woman. Similar associations in Victorian culture between the new visibility of female adolescence and women’s increasingly vocal claims for legal and social equality were to have a profound impact on approaches to girlhood at the turn of the century. Academics at the end of the twentieth century argued that G. Stanley Hall, an American psychologist, ‘invented’ or ‘created’ the concept of adolescence as we know it: his male adolescent certainly demonstrates many of the characteristics now regarded as typical of the experience.3 Hall described men’s adolescence as a kind of ‘second birth’, a period marked by psychological trauma but leading progressively to a ‘better consciousness’.4 Specifically, Hall’s male adolescent experienced self-absorption, fluctuating emotions, increased idealism, religious enthusiasm, and ambition, leading finally towards increased self-knowledge.5 Hall represents female adolescence, meanwhile, as a period of incapacity and unconsciousness— a rather less enduring vision of the interim phase: furthermore, Hall’s female subject would never truly grow out of this condition but would remain in an ‘adolescent’ dependent state throughout her adult life.6 At first glance, this description of the female adolescent may appear simply to express the views of a Victorian antifeminist. Yet while various medical texts did continue to emphasize the physical and emotional vulnerability of girls at the fin de siècle, many of the ideas Hall portrays as the preserve of the male adolescent in 1904 regularly structured discussions of girlhood in the second half of the 3 Respectively, Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea (London: Faber, 1982), 228 (‘the myth of adolescence has thrived most richly since G. Stanley Hall invented it’) and Joseph F. Kett, ‘Adolescence and Youth in Nineteenth Century America, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 283. 4 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1904), ii. 72. 5 See Spacks’s analysis of these states, The Adolescent Idea, 228–36, and also John Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (London: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 8. 6 For critical discussion see Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981), ch. 4, and Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 69.

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century.7 Such ideas had long been circulating in Victorian discourse —particularly in literature by women, for women. Mrs Robert Stephenson’s Maidenhood and Motherhood (1887) exemplifies this point. Addressing herself to that period ‘which lies between childhood and womanhood’, Stephenson observes that ‘there are some who begin then to develop the habit of meditation’, and that ‘one of the greatest temptations of maidenhood is selfabsorption’.8 Here, it seems, is Hall’s male youth’s ‘inner absorption and reverie’, perhaps even (in the reference to ‘meditation’) his interest in ‘telepathy, hypnotism, spiritism, great inventions’.9 Mrs Stephenson discourses on the ‘labyrinths of sorrow, temptation, disappointment, and heart-ache, for there is no time in all our lives that we have such capacity for mental anguish as we have during the time of our maidenhood’. Hall later describes ‘the dominance of sentiment over thought’ in male adolescence and comments: ‘Young people weep and sigh, they know not why.’10 Mrs Stephenson evokes these experiences as something the girl will inevitably leave behind: ‘When we are children we don’t think about ourselves at all, and when we are wives and mothers we think very little about ourselves, but as maidens I am afraid that no one in the whole world is of so much importance to us as ourselves.’ Hall’s text, which in toto argues for the period between childhood and adulthood as a transitional, developmental stage, attests to the ‘overassertion of individuality’ in male adolescence: ‘His ego must be magnified and all the new environment subordinated to it.’11 Both Stephenson’s and Hall’s terms resonate in later twentieth-century psychoanalytic theories of adolescence. Anna Freud, for example, famously proposed in 1958: ‘I take it that is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner . . . an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge . . . the ego of the individual in question does not cease to experiment . . .’12 7 For discussion of medical tracts dealing with the dangers of study, see Flint, Woman Reader, ch. 4. For an examination of medical advice to girls at puberty, see Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982), ch. 5. 8 Mrs Robert Stephenson, Maidenhood and Motherhood (London: Hatchards, 9 1887), 7, 7, 28. Hall, Adolescence i. 311; 310–11. 10 Stephenson, Maidenhood and Motherhood, 8; Hall, Adolescence, i. 318; ii. 77. 11 Stephenson, Maidenhood and Motherhood, 28–9; Hall, Adolescence, i. 315. 12 Anna Freud, ‘Adolescence’, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 13 (1958), 255–78; 275.

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However, in spite of the widespread use of similar terms to describe the awkward age in the late nineteenth century, Hall’s female adolescent incorporates virtually none of these characteristics. While the medical establishment tended to be particularly resistant to the idea of changes in the role and condition of women, another factor may have influenced Hall’s representation: female adolescent experience had taken on a particularly dangerous character during the last decades of the nineteenth century, I suggest, becoming closely associated with a central trope of transgressive femininity—the awakening consciousness of the New Woman.13 Hall’s representation of female adolescence, which is obviously and explicitly informed by antifeminist perspectives, may have been shaped by a desire to free his subject from the New Woman’s troubling acquisition of self-knowledge. For girls, like New Women, are represented as dangerously modern creatures in late Victorian discourse—as very different creatures from their mothers. In an article published in response to Mrs Crackanthorpe’s famous piece on ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, Mrs Frederick Harrison depicted a mother contemplating the difficulties of her position: Ours is a time of transition, and all our ideas, political, social, and even religious, are being tested anew . . . We must all admit that much has been done for the higher education of women in this last generation. We have hardly yet gathered the fruits of that important movement. At present we are face to face with the undoubted fact that girls to-day have had a very different training from their mothers.14

Girls’ access to secondary and tertiary education challenged the old mother/daughter identification model: girls’ schools and women’s colleges instituted a new educative system, taking female education out of the home and away from the mother’s aegis.15 Women were still the instructors, but schoolteachers were usually single women with academic interests; this system of education, therefore, not only increased girls’ intellectual knowledge, but also presented them with 13 Hall was American, yet there was a considerable transatlantic exchange of ideas between New Women. Kate Chopin, for instance, lived in St Louis but contributed to The Yellow Book; The Awakening is itself a key examination of a woman’s developing consciousness. 14 E(thel) B(erta) Harrison, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 313–22; 314. 15 Obviously, middle- and upper-class girls were often tutored by governesses rather than their mothers. However, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, girls were expected to learn to become marriageable women from their mother’s example nevertheless.

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independent role models with a career rather than a home and family. Critics such as Joyce Senders Pedersen and Carol Dyhouse have emphasized the conflicting ideologies in the culture of girls’ education, claiming that, far from representing the successful achievements of proto-feminist reformers, institutions of female education were founded on and aimed to perpetuate conservative ideals of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity.16 While an assessment of the truth of this question lies beyond the scope of my book, at the very least it seems evident that late Victorian culture believed that girls’ education was a particular cause of division within the family. Tension between mothers and daughters, stemming from their different educational experiences, is regularly described and discussed. Conservative women writers generally deplore such discord, yet they simultaneously support educational innovation. Thus, for example, Lily Watson notes in the Girl’s Own Paper that ‘There are, unfortunately, homes where it is openly admitted that mothers and daughters “do not get on . . .”’ and she ascribes this to ‘changes in modern society’. However, she is clearly in favour of these changes: while today’s mother ‘emerged from the hands of her governess’ to become ‘a companion to her mother, to be prepared in the home for marriage’, the modern girl is taught that ‘careers abound, and it is perfectly natural that when a girl leaves school, she should ask herself what she is going to do and to be’.17 Mrs Crackanthorpe’s articles on ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ and the pieces written in response have been credited with a substantial role in establishing the terms for debate concerning young women’s demands in the 1890s. These articles formed part of a much wider discussion (within periodical literature in particular) about the training of girls and the future of women.18 Like Jeune and Watson, Crackanthorpe felt that the modern girl was a distinctively new creation, and that society should recognize this development. She agreed, she said, with girls’ pleas ‘for a larger liberty, not license—the 16 See Joyce Senders Pedersen, ‘Life’s Lessons: Liberal Feminist Ideals of Family, School, and Community in Victorian England’, in Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (eds.), The Girl’s Own (London: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 194–215; Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, ch. 2, esp. 57–60. 17 Lily Watson, ‘Girls as Daughters’, Girl’s Own Paper, 21 (1899–1900), 46–7; 47. 18 For discussion on Crackanthorpe’s articles, see Sally Ledger, The New Woman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), ch. 1. Hamlin L. Hill examines the possible influence of this debate on Henry James in ‘ “The Revolt of the Daughters”: A Suggested Source for The Awkward Age’, N&Q 206 (1961), 347–9.

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liberty that claims the right to be an individual as well as a daughter’.19 Unmarried girls should be able to travel, enjoy a proper education, and train for employment; they should be able to become something other than wives and mothers. However, Crackanthorpe specifically denied that her argument should be applied to younger girls: ‘we are not writing of girls in their teens, but of women turned twenty.’ Yet while this proviso seems to remove the transitional girl from debate, the terms Crackanthorpe uses to describe young women’s yearnings are familiar: ‘They are young. They are vital. The springs of life, the thirst to taste its joys, run very strong in their veins. They desire ardently to try things on their own account . . . Their individuality is at this moment the strongest—and the most inconvenient—thing about them.’20 This is the 18-year-old heroine of the preceding decades’ romance novel, the girl examined throughout this book; it is Margaret Holt from Holme Lee’s Sylvan Holt’s Daughter (experiencing ‘wild electric fires—for her nature was ardent, quick, strong, vital’) or Kate Courtenay from Margaret Oliphant’s Ombra (whose ambitions for the future ‘went like wine through her thrilling veins’) rather than, say, Charlotte Yonge’s angry, already disillusioned Rachel Curtis. This indicates that long-standing terms of transitional girlhood were implicitly shaping the cultural sense of the rebellious woman. Descriptions of the New Woman, that arch-rebel, continually invoke just such a rhetoric of awakening youth. Tracing the figure of the New Woman through nineteenth-century fiction, Margaret Oliphant defines her as an unformed, immature being: Herminia, the pioneer of the new movement, is a character very well known in fiction: she is the sublimated schoolgirl of . . . romance . . . [a] wonderful, fluent, brilliant, uninstructed being, with all her strange half-childish theories held with the conviction of a martyr, invincible in the sense of being always right, while the whole world lives in darkness . . .21

Oliphant suggests that the New Woman protagonists are simply the most recent incarnations of a long line of romance heroines. Noting that Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia is 23, she comments: ‘that, I think, is her usual age: unless when she is eighteen, which the girl of my time 19 B(lanche) A(lethea) Crackanthorpe, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 23–31; 26. 20 Ibid. 27, 24. 21 Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, Blackwood’s, 159 (1896), 135–49; 142–3.

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preferred as the age of perfection in wisdom and insight as in other things.’22 Oliphant’s suggestion that the New Woman was essentially the modern version of the immature, ‘half-childish’ heroine is implicitly shared by other antifeminist commentators: Hugh E. M. Stutfield, for instance, used the New Women’s descriptions of their project to evoke ‘The Psychology of Feminism’ as mere self-indulgent self-interest: ‘Her ego, that mysterious entity of which she is now only just becoming conscious, is said to remain a terra incognita even to herself; but they are determined to explore its inmost recesses.’ ‘She is for ever examining her mental self in the looking-glass’, he snorts, dismissing the feminist as an unsettled, changeable creature: ‘in spite of the awakening of her intellect she remains a being of transient impulses and more or less hysterical emotions.’ 23 Yet, surprisingly perhaps, characterizations of the New Woman as an adolescent being are not always negative in cast; for indeed, the New Woman often articulated her own awakenings in similar terms. A number of New Woman novels associate the growth to adulthood with the growth to political consciousness; a number of feminist texts draw on the kinds of themes (mother/daughter conflict, identity confusion, frustration with home life, a longing for public action, dissatisfaction with marriage) that had long lain at the heart of the Victorian women’s novel. As we shall see presently, portrayals of the transitional girl in women’s literature provided not just a stock of terms but a useable heritage, a suggestive literary tradition, of writing about awakenings to disaffected consciousness. Moreover, while women’s writing about girls impacted on the New Woman’s articulation of herself, the young, transitional heroine also continued to make live, ongoing contributions to gender debates in the later years of the century. The girl remained an important tool for probing cultural norms, one available to the most conservative of authors; her restlessness and rebellion could be used to articulate desires for self-determination and independence, secure in the knowledge that wifehood and the third volume could bring the text to a securely traditional conclusion. Yet, inevitably, the novels’ endings tell us only part of the story of the narratives’ politics; the sympathetic 22

Ibid. 143. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘The Psychology of Feminism’, Blackwood’s, 161 (1897), 104–17; 104, 105, 106. Hysteria, of course, was still considered a female condition by many. For further discussion see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1985), ch. 6, and Sexual Anarchy (London: Viking, 1990), 40–1. See also Flint, Woman Reader, 57–60. 23

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recognition of girls’ claims to self-regulation destabilizes the traditional notions of femininity the texts continue to endorse. The redefinition of the ‘girl of the period’ in women’s and girls’ literature played a crucial role in the reconception of what women could be at the fin de siècle. Girls became a new and important focus for the publishing industry; the 1880s saw an explosion of literature—magazines, fiction—aimed at and about girls.24 The figure at the heart of such texts was active, self-confident, articulate, and culturally visible—a figure clearly descended from the transitional girl heroine of the woman’s romance novel. Indeed, this figure was, as I shall now argue, not so much a poor imitation of the New Women as her precursor, and her kin; for both the ‘girl of the periodical’ and the New Woman heroine were anticipated and enabled by the evolving concept of the girl traced so far in this book.

the girl of the periodical The death of Mrs Lynn Linton, the other day, set us talking about the great article in The Saturday Review that made her fame . . . Every period has its girls and you are the girls of yours. I think that I know a good deal about you; and that I appreciate the attitude you adopt towards life. The claims that you make are the result of your reaction against the restrictions that hemmed in the lives of the girls in the days of your grandmothers. The influences that fashioned and moulded them were all negative. ‘Don’t’ is the word they were always hearing, ‘Do’ is the word that inspires you . . . The modern girl . . . is tired of living in a doll’s house, and, married or unmarried, she will never take a back seat.25 24 Penny Tinkler discusses how girls’ magazines responded to the increased cultural recognition of adolescence in ‘Women and Popular Literature’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995), 131–57; see esp. 140. For discussion on the gendering of the juvenile market see esp. 140–1; Kirsten Drotner discusses divisions in the market by class and age in English Children and Their Magazines 1751–1945 (London: Yale University Press, 1988), esp. 116–18. For further discussion on the growth of girls’ fiction see Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (New York: Harvester, 1990); for discussion on the development of the schoolgirl novel into the twentieth century, see Rosemary Auchmuty, The World of Girls (London: The Women’s Press, 1992). 25 (Alice Corkran), ‘A Chat With the Girl of the Period’, Girl’s Realm, 1 (1898), 216.

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The phrase ‘the girl of the period’ gained new currency towards the end of the century, reshaped by periodicals such as the Girl’s Own Paper, Atalanta, Girl’s Realm, and the burgeoning genre of the girls’ novel. Writers used ‘girl of the period’ to describe an explicitly modern girl: ‘breezy, plucky, quick to enjoy, and ready to stand by her sex’, she was ‘intensely alive’, ‘brimming over with hopes and aims’.26 Emptying the phrase of its negative associations, authors freighted terms like ‘modernity’ and ‘of the period’ with newly positive meanings. Linton, of course, valorized traditions and the past, preferring ‘the simple and genuine girl of the past’ above ‘this loud and rampant modernisation’; girls’ writers of the late nineteenth century, by contrast, registered their support for the opportunities facing girls on the threshold of a new century and roundly criticized ‘the restrictions that hemmed in the lives of the girls in the days of your grandmothers’. Authors also approach Longfellow’s much-quoted lines with disdain, stressing their failure to describe what it felt like to be a girl on the verge of adulthood at the fin de siècle. Louisa Molesworth quotes Longfellow’s ubiquitous third verse in an 1890 Atalanta article, only to proceed: That is a very hackneyed quotation, is it not? It is so pretty, however, so pretty and ‘poetical,’ so appropriate to the sort of notion people have long had and like to have about their girls, that it is not likely to get into disfavour in a hurry. It is very pretty . . . But is it true? I scarcely think so.27

The modern girl, Molesworth stresses, is not a ‘reluctant’ but a ‘vigorous’ being; not a ‘retiring creature’ but a ‘Tomboy’; a girl who loathes ‘long skirts and quiet movements’, she may even tend to ‘hoydenishness’.28 Longfellow’s image of suspended animation did not chime with fin de siècle writers’ conception of girls as active, sporty, energetic, and forward-looking. Critics such as Penny Tinkler and Kimberley Reynolds express extreme suspicion at these visions of vigorous girlhood. Tinkler argues, indeed, that the girl of the period in girls’ magazines is essentially the angel in the house in disguise. The magazines’ commitment to modern opportunities represents an insidious attempt to attract and then indoctrinate the girl-reader, she suggests: This modernity . . . was not always in a girl’s best interests. In many cases, magazine responses to change can be seen as an exercise in ‘defensive 26 27 28

Ibid. 216, 432. Mrs (Louisa) Molesworth, ‘Coming Out’, Atalanta, 3 (1889–90), 520–22; 520. Ibid. 520.

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modernization’; the recognition but also the containment of change in ways which maintained reader support without undermining the crux of femininity: namely domesticity and heterosexuality, and the patriarchal interests these served.29

Reynolds similarly claims that girls’ popular fictions only appear to embrace a new ideal of femininity; in fact, she argues, they ‘[take] details from contemporary debate about the behaviour associated with the new imaging of women, and [contrast] them with the internal values identified with old notions of femininity. The result is an essentially conservative attack on the “girl of the period”.’30 Yet accounts of the proactive, spirited, rebellious girl in magazines and in novels by authors including Rosa Nouchette Carey and Sarah Tytler predate the high-feminist fictions of the 1890s by as much as a decade: Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Caird’s Whom Nature Leadeth were published in 1883, certainly, but the most famous New Woman novels, the ones that created the greatest stir, were not produced until 1894.31 In the light of this it seems precipitous to dismiss the late nineteenth-century girl of the period as simply a reactionary phenomenon. It is certainly true that writers who centre on such figures continue to underwrite essentially conservative ideals of the genders’ relations, even as they celebrate women’s educational advancements and their entrance into the world of employment. However, as we shall see, feminist New Women novels are themselves characterized by a similarly complex approach to contemporary gender ideologies, regularly combining support for women’s social enfranchisement with celebrations of essentialist conceptions of femininity. Evidence of conflicted politics is hardly enough to charge writing aimed at girls with ‘defensive modernization’; thus far this book has demonstrated that romance texts were neither merely toeing a party line nor subverting the politics of the patriarchy, but rather engaged in an ongoing, active, interrogative questioning of both traditional gender norms and the new possibilities confronting women. Girls’ literature, as we shall see, reveals a similarly questioning approach. There are many overlaps between women’s and girls’ popular literature of the 1880s: the sprightly girl of the period surfaced in both, 29 Tinkler, ‘Women and Popular Literature’, 151. Tinkler focuses on magazines from 1920–45; however, her discussion does extend back to 1880, and she includes the Girl’s Own Paper in her conclusions. 30 31 Reynolds, Girls Only?, 98. See n. 51 in Chapter 4.

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and often the only way to evaluate the novels’ projected readership is to analyse the more or less risqué content of the narratives. Rosa Nouchette Carey’s work is particularly hard to categorize. Mary St John (1882), for example, has a broadly romantic theme and technically focuses on the older, idealized titular heroine. However, the figure of the cheery 18-year-old Dollie would clearly appeal to a younger reader and points towards a shift in Carey’s literary and cultural interests: she had begun writing for the Girl’s Own Paper in the early 1880s. Dollie is very much a sympathetic girl of the period; Carey’s young heroine enjoys specifically modern freedoms—many of which were still contested by antifeminists in the next decade. She works at the School of Art and asserts proudly: ‘“I always think it a pity that girls should be so helpless. I mean to be an artist myself”’ (Mary St John, 31).32 She walks through London unchaperoned, although girls continued to petition for this right in periodical articles such as ‘A Reply from the Daughters’ (1894): Dollie is presented in the early pages of the novel ‘briskly’ tripping through central London, a ‘slim figure in [a] gray gown and broad brimmed hat’.33 Dollie also plays tennis, once again a potentially contentious image, since girls’ participation in sports remained a concern both in the next decade and in the early twentieth century.34 Linton’s article on ‘The Wild Women as Social Insurgents’, for example, criticized the woman who became ‘Hot and damp, mopping her flushed and streaming face with her handkerchief’,35 yet Dollie is described in this state as ‘a sweet embodiment of health and youth and bright sunny happiness’ (MSJ 370). Dollie is both a girl of the period and daughter to a long tradition of women’s romance heroines. As in so many Victorian women’s novels, Mary St John opens with a girl’s eighteenth birthday; as always, the girl perceives this to be a complicated occasion, part happy (a moment of accession to adulthood), part sad (a time in which she realizes how circumscribed her life is and is likely to remain). Dollie 32 Rosa Nouchette Carey, Mary St John (1882; London: Macmillan, 1898), hereafter referenced parenthetically as MSJ. 33 See, for example, Lady Kathleen Cuffe, ‘A Reply from the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 437–44; 440–1. 34 Dyhouse discusses gynaecological arguments against exercise from the 1880s through to the early twentieth century; see Girls Growing Up, ch. 4, esp. 129–30. However, girls’ schools had taught ‘callisthenics’ since the 1850s. See Gorham, The Victorian Girl, 96–7. 35 Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Wild Women as Social Insurgents’, Nineteenth Century, 30 (1891), 596–605; 598–9.

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is intensely frustrated by her limited existence, and looks to her nineteenth year as the beginning of a more liberated, exciting life: ‘“I am sure something is going to happen . . . I am eighteen to-day. One cannot go to sleep all one’s life, or go on dreaming like a stagnant old mill-stream. Look at all those faces, and every one with their own story. I have not begun to live mine yet . . .”’ (MSJ 3). A few pages later, she tells her mother: Oh dear, this restlessness! I wonder if it be very wicked, or if it be only natural to have one’s nature working up like yeast, and to be always fermenting with a sort of inward excitement; if only something would happen; but nothing ever does happen. (MSJ 6)36

Dollie is inspired by the need ‘to do’: a girl who longs to plunge headlong into life, she is well characterized by Alice Corkran in Girl’s Realm, a decade later, as ‘a creature of the open air; she wants to be stirring. She is tired of being taken to see her brother play football; she wants to have a kick at it herself.’37 Of course, the reader recognizes that something must, indeed, be about to happen to this energetic heroine: when she arrives home, she discovers that her mother has received a letter inviting her to visit relatives abroad. Carey symbolizes this opportunity for travel as a broadening psychological experience: ‘the day came when Dollie stood on the edge of a new world’ (MSJ 40). Frustration with domesticity and a desire for travel is a common theme in representations of the girl at this time. In Eleanor Creathorne Clayton’s A Girl’s Destiny (1882), the 18-year-old heroine is (like Perrin’s Josephine and Croker’s Nora) thoroughly bored by her home-bound existence. Dione ‘did her best to stifle the vague yearnings that beset a girl’s heart’ (A Girl’s Destiny, i. 40);38 her inner 36 Dollie’s expressions of discontent echo the words of numerous heroines of women’s romance literature. Compare her words, for example, with those of Bithia Mary Croker’s Diana Barrington: ‘ “Why am I discontented? How promptly I would answer this question! I am tired to death of my dull, unvaried life, in this old grey Bungalow . . . Is all my life to be spent thus? This is my eighteenth birthday. Eighteen years have already slipped away, unmarked by one notable event; are eighteen more to drift by in the same colourless fashion? Am I never to see other places, and other faces, or that great unknown mystery called the World—the world which lies beyond those vast yellow plains and vague violet-tinted hills? I long fiercely, and rebelliously—and quite uselessly—for something more soul-satisfying . . .” ’ (Bithia Mary Croker, Diana Barrington, 3 vols. (London: Ward & Downey, 1888), i. 5–6). 37 (Corkran), ‘A Chat With the Girl of the Period’, 216. 38 E(leanor) C(reathorne) Clayton, A Girl’s Destiny: A Love Story, 3 vols. (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1882), hereafter referenced parenthetically as GD.

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monologues register particular frustration with her daily occupation of ‘crewel work’, which she calls ‘fiddle-faddle nonsense. What’s the good of this thing when it’s done, I should like to know? . . . I wish— I don’t know what I wish. It’s a bother being a girl. You have to stay at home, and you can’t do anything’ (GD i. 41). Dione’s idiomatic phrases and slang-ridden vocabulary remind us of Linton’s girl of the period, who used ‘slang, bold talk and general fastness’, although Dione’s chattery manner is sanctioned by the author. Dione is unable to articulate all her desires (‘“I wish—I don’t know what I wish”’), but she focuses her ambitions on vague dreams of journeys: ‘“I wish somebody would leave papa a big fortune, and then he could travel, and I could see something of the world”’ (GD i. 41–2). Her semiinarticulate desire for something prefigures H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica: ‘She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient—she did not clearly know for what—to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in coming.’39 Her irritation with domestic tasks may also remind us of Hadria Fullerton in Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894): ‘“The ordinary domestic idea may have been inevitable when women were emerging from the condition of simple animals, but now it seems to me to be out of date”’ (The Daughters of Danaus, 69).40 More immediately, Clayton’s portrayal anticipates Sara Jeanette Duncan’s scathing description of the conventional occupations of middle- and upper-class women in Atalanta (1889): In this golden age for girls, full of new interests and new opportunities, we all . . . want to do something; something more difficult than embroidered sachets, and more important than hand-painted tambourines. The sachets and the tambourines are very charming in their way, but as the chief industrial end of life we have begun to find them unsatisfying.41

Clayton’s text is primarily concerned with plots of mistaken identity, misconduct, and false accusations—and also contains a rather scandalously behaved actress. This is not the world of Atalanta or the Girl’s Own Paper; Clayton presumably has a more adult readership in mind. Yet if A Girl’s Destiny is ultimately a woman’s novel, it is one that reveals the close affinity between girls’ and women’s literature in the 1880s. The energetic Dionne could comfortably appear in 39

H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica (1909; London: Virago, 1980), 4. ‘G. Noel Hatton’ (Alice Mona Caird), The Daughters of Danaus (London: Bliss, Sands & Foster, 1894). 41 Sara Jeanette Duncan, ‘How An American Girl Became A Journalist’, Atalanta, 3 (1889–90), 91–4; 91. 40

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the pages of any contemporary girls’ periodical, suggesting that texts aimed at older and younger readers were equally fascinated by the charactersitics of the transitional girl. The texts are also equally ambivalent about girls’ desires for autonomy. Carey repeatedly diminishes the impact of Dollie’s restless discontent, representing it as mere girlish frustration: thus she interjects into the girl’s painful musings that ‘in common with most girls, [Dollie] loved dearly to indulge in a daydream’ (MSJ 3), while the description of Dollie’s restlessness is prefaced by her mother’s weighted admonition, ‘“My dear . . . are you not talking a little wildly?”’ (MSJ 6). The girl’s faintly disparaging attitude towards her mother and her expressions of dissatisfaction are gently ridiculed: ‘What was the use of mothers if they were not to wait upon “Dollies,” and when Dollie was the widow’s mite too’, while ‘her girlish talk quite rippled and overflowed, like a little brook when its toy dam had been destroyed’ (MSJ 4–5). Dollie’s name itself implies a child’s—a girl’s—toy. Rather as M. E. Haweis dismisses ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ by categorizing it as a home-based, agebased issue,42 so Carey allows Dollie a restricted arena of minimized significance: the brook is little, the dam a toy, Dollie herself a ‘mite’. Furthermore, Dollie is technically not the heroine of the text: this position is held by Mary St John, a pattern of feminine virtues. By the end of the novel, exposure to Mary has moderated Dollie’s chattery, restless nature, and the girl realizes that marriage, after all, provides the best opportunity for a meaningful life. A similar commitment to marriage is apparent in A Girl’s Destiny also, which establishes its conservative credentials from the subtitle—‘A Love Story’. Indeed, the basic plot of Clayton’s novel—Dione’s father was framed and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit and lives apart from the world out of shame—technically ‘explains’ the particular nature of Dione’s limited existence; Dione’s frustration is portrayed as a specific response to an unusual situation. Such efforts to limit and contain a heroine’s desire for a broader sphere, to denude it of its potential political meaning, must remind us of what Tinkler called ‘defensive modernization’—namely, the effort to maintain a modern reader’s support without undermining conventional ideals of femininity. And yet, as Ann Ardis has pointed out, feminist New Woman 42 ‘Many girls at a certain age seem to like a grievance, and when they feel bored at home hunt around for an excuse and mistake it for a reason.’ M(ary) E(liza) Haweis, ‘Daughters and Mothers’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 430–6; 431.

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novels were themselves given to defending the status quo while simultaneously advocating the radical, to representing a rebellious character who ultimately becomes compliant: [M]uch of the discourse about New Women is contradictory, heteroglossic. Radical writers were as likely as conservatives to write boomerang plots that either catapult their rebellious heroines back into conventionality or show the next generation’s backlash against their mothers’ feminism. And any given text is likely to pull in several directions at once.43

The idea that conservative and radical positions may not coexist is a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon; certainly no editor of a Victorian girls’ magazine accepted such an idea. L. T. Meade, editor of Atalanta, printed conservative didactic prose alongside articles by and about some of the major feminist intellectuals and activists of the day: in its third issue, for instance, an article by the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett appeared next to conservative fiction by Mrs Molesworth and Meade herself. Fawcett’s article, true to form, is a polemical piece about the lack of opportunities for women in the civil service. ‘It may fairly be quoted as one of the grievances of women’, Fawcett remarks, ‘that although their employment as civil servants has been so highly successful, no attempt has been made to open to them work in any other Government office besides the Post Office.’44 It seems strange to claim that girls’ periodicals (or a novel such as Mary St John) functioned against ‘a girl’s best interests’ simply because their politics were uneven and various, when New Woman fiction of the period was itself characteristically ‘contradictory, heteroglossic’. Ardis’s views on the ‘boomerang plot’ in New Woman writing are also suggestive in this context: ‘ideological contradictions’, she argues, ‘are precisely what invite the skipping reader to skip: to ignore that with which she cannot identify, to fail to hear/read whatever messages miss her mark.’45 Ardis’s views are clearly informed by modern conceptions of the reader as key to the production of textual meaning: writers and theorists from a range of disciplines now share the belief ‘that reading has as much to do with what the reader brings 43 Ann L. Ardis, ‘Organizing Women: New Woman Writers, New Woman Readers, and Suffrage Feminism’, in Nicola Diane Thompson (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 189–203; 190. 44 Millicent Garrett Fawcett, ‘Employment for Girls: The Civil Service’, Atalanta, 1 45 (1887), 174–6; 176. Ardis, ‘Organizing Women’, 198.

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to the text and how the reader interacts with the text as with the text itself’.46 The ‘meaning’ of a text is unfixed and constantly open to interpretation: as Sally Mitchell has put it, ‘The same material has multiple uses for different readers, for the same reader at different times, and for the same reader simultaneously when the book serves overlapping and conflicting functions.’47 In the light of these critical interpretations, the protean figure at the heart of novels like Mary St John appears less a propagandist’s sleight of hand and more an embodiment of a common late Victorian literary phenomenon. Open to numerous interpretations, the girl of the period and the texts in which she stars allow a reader either to celebrate conventional feminine virtues (self-abnegation, compliance, and domesticity); or to take pleasure in the adumbration of a modern, active, sporty young heroine; or, indeed, to enjoy the vibrant coexistence of the two. To that end, Mary St John offers the reader two plots; one of the restless, rebellious Dollie and a second, more traditional narrative concerning Mary herself. Mary is a type of the patient Griselda, suffering tests and trials that reveal her Christ-like powers of endurance. Like Eliot’s Dorothea, Mary is forced to give up her lover, Bertie, in order to inherit Crome Hall, which has been willed to her on condition that she does not marry him. Mary’s sister-in-law talks her into the sacrifice because Mary’s brother, a priest, is exhausted by his London duties; his wife feels that the parish around Crome Hall will be less stressful and time-consuming. Yet, although this plot provides the self-willed young Dollie (and the reader) with a model of self-abnegating womanhood, there is no straight opposition of good/bad heroines in this novel. True, Dollie is the girl of the period, Mary the ideal woman of the past; Dollie’s truest location is busy, modish London, while Mary’s is the peaceful, rural countryside. Yet Mary (as we shall see) adapts herself to Dollie’s model at the end of the narrative; moreover, the image of quiet, reserved, still womanhood is presented with something akin to horror in a scene in which the two heroines find the grave of a 20-year-old nun. This episode— like Brontë’s description of the legendary buried nun in Villette—is clearly infused with anti-Catholic prejudice; it remains interesting for its explication of fear at an image constructed as repressed wom46 Vivian Zamel, ‘Writing One’s Way Into Reading’, TESOL Quarterly, 26 (1992), 463–83; 467. 47 Sally Mitchell, The New Girl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 143.

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anhood.48 The lively Dollie is filled with horror when she sees the grave: ‘“Could she have been a girl like us, Mary, with real flesh and blood, with a heart to feel and enjoy?”’ (MSJ 68). She constructs a narrative for herself about the nun’s death that emphasizes her fear of oppression, of an enervating entombment that occurs long before death: ‘“Perhaps . . . the convent rules, and the monotony, and the awful stillness, killed her—aged twenty, poor Sister Veronica! yes, she must have died of it.”’ Mary’s response to the nun is straightforwardly Christian—‘“Alas, poor soul! but she sleeps, and sleeps well”’ (MSJ 70), but Dollie fears the ‘“deadness”’ in her life, ‘“the want of everything that goes to make up life”’ (MSJ 70, 69). Despite Dollie’s fear of the ‘deadness’ of womanhood, the novel leads her ultimately to marriage—with a man named Grey, which suggests the dullness of her choice, not to mention recalling the terrifying narrative of the entombed nun.49 There are other, even more obvious indications of an ambiguous response to marriage at the close of the novel. While on one level Dollie appears to have internalized Mary’s traditional womanly qualities—she ‘seemed to have no ideas of her own by the way she referred everything to Grey’s judgement’ (MSJ 469)—the text leaves open the suggestion that Dollie is more than she ‘seems’. Dollie is finally endowed with substantial property: Mary gives up Crome Hall in order to marry the man she loves and Dollie turns out to be the new owner under the terms of the will. In 1882, the concept of a married woman endowed with property was topical, and the novel seems keen to represent wifehood as compatible with property ownership. Dollie behaves with comparative independence and determination at this stage: she forcefully opposes her fiancé when he suggests to her mother that the engagement be terminated in the light of her inheritance: ‘“Why do you address yourself to my mother? Why do you not speak to me? . . . I am not a child that you and my mother should settle everything between you”’ (MSJ 467). The novel makes an effort to reconfigure the hierarchical relation between husband and wife; now that Dollie is the landowner, Grey must live on ‘‘[his] wife’s money”’. Like Bertie in Oliphant’s Ombra, Grey finds himself forced to give up his career 48 ‘The legend went . . . that this was the portal of a vault, emprisoning deep beneath that ground, on whose surface grass grew and flowers bloomed, the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive, for some sin against her vow’ (Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; London: Penguin, 1979), 172). 49 Trollope also used the name (John) Grey for one of his more sober, less exciting heroes in Can You Forgive Her?

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as a barrister, quell his rebellious feelings, and relocate himself to his wife’s establishment in an interesting inversion of traditional gender roles: ‘“To tell you the truth, I rebelled for a time at the thought of living on my wife’s money, but Dollie and I have talked it over . . . I could hardly live in London and my wife here”’ (MSJ 471). Clearly, Dollie’s persuasion has been an important element in his decision. Finally, as if to stress that Dollie is an active agent in the revision of the novel’s patterns of femininity, the text’s ending sees the girl literally imposing her identity on Mary. For the wedding, ‘Dollie had decided that she and Mary were to be dressed alike. She would not have a fold or a flower different, and Mary yielded to avoid argument . . .’ (MSJ 476). This suggests that if Mary remains prepared to suppress her judgement, Dollie remains in possession of her own ideas and is prepared to fight for them. Thus while horror at repression, at images of suffering womanhood does not lead to a full rejection of traditional gender norms, the novel does allow the reader to detect a challenge to conventional visions of young women and wives as biddable and compliant. Rather than rejecting the past and tradition or, indeed, the present and modernity, Mary St John incorporates sympathetic visions of both—and subsequently multiplies the types of ‘acceptable’ girlhood available to the reader. Indeed, the generation of a more plentiful stock of girlish ideals is a key feature of girls’ literature from the last decades of the century. In the first place, girlhood became a less class-bound concept at this time, less intrinsically tied to a leisured, interim phase between the schoolroom and the altar.50 Girls’ magazines initially brought different classes together, united in a common sisterhood—in what one magazine proudly called an ‘esprit de corps’.51 The one-penny Girl’s 50 It is worth noting that the phrase ‘coming out’ was apparently used in the later decades of the century to mean leaving school: ‘Coming out is an expression often used for leaving school, and the regular hours and routine of school-room life . . .’ notes one Girl’s Own Paper contributor. This interpretation would makes the phrase available to a broader social spectrum; a lower-middle-class girl could describe herself as ‘coming out’, even if she was about to embark on employment. ‘Ximena’, 775. 51 (Corkran) ‘Chat With the Girl of the Period’, 324. In this, the second ‘Chat’, Corkran notes: ‘I said something [in the last issue] about esprit de corps. I had a curious and suggestive letter from “Jessica.” “Of course, I knew what it meant,” she writes, “but I thought I would just look it up in the dictionary and see how Mr Nuttall defined it. He says it is ‘a spirit of brotherhood.’ Isn’t it just silly? I shall write and tell him to add, ‘or sisterhood’ in the next edition, for I, for one, certainly mean to be very sex-loyal . . .” Now this exactly strikes the right note. We are not going to have “sisterhood” swallowed up in “brotherhood,” and brotherhood just settling, as it were, for both.’ This challenging tone is characteristic of the late Victorian Girl’s Realm.

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Own Paper, for example, was aimed at lower-middle-class needs and interests, but it also reflected upper-middle-class tastes. Issues combined articles on professional work—nursing, journalism, teaching, missionary work, dressmaking, secretarial work, acting— with pieces on the latest society fashions; cookery sections advised on how to prepare a leg of mutton for a family or how to mix the spices for a Brinjal Curry; letters in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ section advised on the best brands of boot-blacking and floorcleaner, on the etiquette of dating while in service, and on reputable employment agencies while simultaneously providing critical commentary on subscribers’ poetic efforts and information about protocol in the royal drawing-rooms (there was clearly an aspirational as well as a practical element to the magazine).52 Papers aimed at all classes celebrated sporting activities, from the Girl’s Own Paper and middle-class monthlies including Atalanta to lower-class half-penny magazines such as Girl’s Friend. While hockey, cricket, and lawn tennis tended to be middle-class pursuits, girls of all classes were encouraged to enjoy swimming and cycling and generally to revel in their potential for intrepidity and physical daring. For the new conception of girlhood as a phase of activity and vigour was available to working-class women in ways that ‘coming out’ clearly was not. Thus while middle-class periodical stories celebrated the girl who travelled to India and battled wild tigers, working-class serial fictions depicted heroines who became detectives and engaged in daring hand-to-hand combat.53 Many girls’ novels of the period similarly attempted to represent (and authorize) a broad range of ambitions, celebrating both the girl who chose marriage and the girl who decided to go out into the world. Sarah Tytler was a well-known writer of advice texts and a contributor, like Carey, to the Girl’s Own Paper: in A Houseful of Girls (1889) she describes, not the trials of a single girl, but rather the effects of financial hardship on a large middle-class family. The text recalls the ‘esprit de corps’ atmosphere of the girls’ magazine by evoking the ‘freemasonry of dawning womanhood’ in its early pages 52 For articles on social etiquette aimed at a range of classes see, for example, Ardern Holt, ‘Etiquette for Ladies and Girls’, Girl’s Own Paper, 1 (1880), 211–12 and ‘How Girls Are Presented At Court’, Girl’s Own Paper, 1 (1880), 419–20; S. F. A. Caulfield, ‘Etiquette for All Classes’, Girl’s Own Paper, 3 (1881–2), 90–1; La Petite, ‘Social Events in A Girl’s Life: How I Was Presented at Court’, Girl’s Own Paper, 18 (1896), 161–3. 53 For further discussion see Mitchell, The New Girl, esp. 108–11.

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(A Houseful of Girls, 2);54 the girls thus bonded range from Annie, who is 22, to ‘Little May’, who is between 16 and 17. ‘[S]he was a rose in the bud still, with the unfilled out outlines and crude angularities of a girl not done growing,’ Tytler begins romantically, concluding her description by noting: ‘under it all she was the born scholar of the family’ (HG 11). For unlike (say) the May sisters in Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, the girls at the heart of Tytler’s text are able to consider careers and higher education as suitable prospects for womanhood. Tytler initially uses a technique similar to Carey’s, minimizing the impact of May’s scholarship through the addition of the diminutive in front of her name and by accenting her youth and immaturity. After this emphasis on May’s youth and dependence, we are not surprised to learn that when she becomes a ‘sweet girl graduate’ at ‘Thirlwall Hall’ she is overwhelmed by: The hoary dignity of the old colleges, receptacles of the concentrated learning of ages, the crowds of capped and gowned tutors and professors, potent representatives of the learning of the present . . . She was still one of a household largely composed of women, as she had been at home, but here the household was planted where it was an innovation, in the midst of a colony of men, which constantly threatened to sweep over it and submerge it. (HG 290)

May is caught between the past and the present: she feels submerged by the traditions of the past and threatened by the tide of modernity. The narrator explains this as a distinctive problem of the age: the sweet girl graduate will retain her feminine virtues, Tytler suggests, and will therefore inevitably find university studies hard. An early description of May’s capabilities, before financial disaster necessitates training for all the girls, emphasizes that entering higher education will be a wrenching experience: the girl will have to ‘tear herself away from familiar and dear surroundings’ if she is to ‘earn for them the best distinction of usefulness’ (HG 12). Tytler seems convinced that pain must accompany study, yet her novel stresses that it is possible to be both a good daughter and a good student and that tertiary education may prove the best means of fulfilling one’s function in the world. A wealth of literature aimed at girls in the last years of the century similarly insists that young 54 ‘Sarah Tytler’ (Henrietta Keddie), A Houseful of Girls (London: Walter Smith & Innes, 1889), hereafter referenced parenthetically as HG.

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women may contribute most to society by entering higher education or taking employment. For example, an article on ‘The Girls of ToDay’ (1899) in the Girl’s Own Paper contends: It is our determination not to be objects of compassion, neither will we be useless lumber in our homes . . . We have come to the conclusion that we shall live better lives and longer lives if we work well and cheerfully at that which falls to our lot. The nation will be the better for our influence and example, and our brothers cannot and will not be content to smoke and dawdle away their time at clubs and music halls while we, their sisters, are earnestly working.55

The writer turns the old antifeminist argument—that if women are no longer gracing the fireside there will be no reason for men to leave their clubs—on its head: the article suggests that a girl will best discharge her familial and societal duties through employment. Tytler’s novel, written a decade previously, positively celebrates the girl who shoulders her responsibilities in this fashion. Annie, the eldest girl, stresses the ‘honour’ of such labour: ‘“Think of the women who go out into the world by no compulsion, simply for the honour and pleasure of the thing, because they will not stay at home to lead idle, useless lives, when there is needful work to be done abroad”’ (HG 67). Tytler’s text is ultimately most comfortable with expressions of outright independence from the slightly older girl, like Annie; she also only endorses self-governing action when family exigency demands it.56 As a whole the novel continues to romanticize women as ideally compliant and morally pure; as occupants, ideally, of the home. Yet A Houseful of Girls is a text that demonstrates, once again, the seemingly endless ways in which conservative ideologies of gender could be shaped and reshaped; the ways in which the baseline belief in ‘equal but different’, a doctrine so seemingly rigid, could be manipulated and reinterpreted. Daughterly duties and sisterly responsibilities coexist with personal independent action in Tytler’s text; employment, education, and travel may positively reveal a woman’s ‘feminine’ qualities. 55

‘One of Them’, ‘The Girls of To-Day’, Girl’s Own Paper, 21 (1899–1900), 131. Meade endorses the idea of girls entering university—again, as long as family circumstances demand it. In A Sweet Girl Graduate, Priscilla enters St Benet’s partly because she loves study but also to support her siblings. As her clergyman mentor puts it: ‘You must not give up your books, my dear . . . for, independently of the pleasure they afford, they will give you bread and butter.’ L. T. Meade, A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891; Chicago: M. A. Donohue, n.d.), 56. 56

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Girls’ literature of the later nineteenth century was characterized by its engagement with the new possibilities becoming available to women, and many such texts worked hard to fuse support for these possibilities with socially conservative conceptions of femininity.57 Writers struggled to represent desires for education and employment as the normal experiences of everygirl and as consistent with traditional ideals of femininity. Yet efforts to negotiate conservative conceptions of a woman’s place and responsibilities reached breaking point in the later years of the century, as many authors struggled to imagine how the newly articulate, educated, and self-confident girl could or should actually become a woman. The pain of this process engaged New Woman and romance writers alike in the century’s final years.

awakenings It was the sunshine really that first called her into conscious existence, the blessed heat and light . . . that moment roused her, calling forth from her senses their first response in the thrill of warmth and well-being to which she awoke, and quickening her intellect at the same time with the stimulating effort to discover from whence her comfort came. (Beth, 10)

British New Woman novels of the 1890s often centred on a heroine’s awakening to the consciousness of her own capabilities, and on the ways in which society inhibited the exploration of those capabilities. Some awakenings happen suddenly, initiated by an event that forces the heroine to realize the perfidy of prevailing gender and/or sexual double standards; others occur more slowly, organically, as an unusual girl resists fitting herself into a conventional Victorian mould. Both plot structures, and the central theme of awakening to consciousness, owe much to the evolving tradition of women’s (and latterly girls’) fiction traced in this book: feminist writers’ representations of the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of a political and/or disaffected consciousness invariably draw on plot structures 57 Of course, not all girls’ literature aimed to reconcile modern girls’ desires with traditional views of womanly virtue; Everett Green’s A Difficult Daughter, discussed in the last chapter, is a novel that works extremely hard to characterize girls’ desires for greater freedom as intensely threatening to the nation’s well-being.

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and themes central to earlier women writers’ depictions of the transition to womanhood. Close attention to the relationship between the portrayal of these experiences serves to highlight once more the problems of distinguishing between radical and conservative authors in the nineteenth century; it also underscores the existence of longunrecovered relationships and exchanges between women writers. Throughout this book, we have seen the ways in which Victorian gender ideologies were appropriated, manipulated, and reinterpreted by women authors. Standard feminist readings of such ideological manipulations have construed them as evidence of subversion, rebellion, encodement. Yet the prevalence of such manipulations must give us pause; for indeed, the texts discussed in this book have virtually all revealed an awareness of the ways in which ideologies of gender could be reshaped, and thus of their essential constructedness. We must surely accept that unease is not merely the preserve of the radical, but part of what it means to be human and to hold an opinion. To put the point slightly, but significantly, differently, it seems important not to equate conservative opinion with dogma—at least, not simplistically to conflate the two; for, as a matter of historical fact, conservative Victorians regularly questioned, not just the new visions of a woman’s role evolving at this time, but traditional visions of women’s sphere and women’s character also. Conservative conceptions of ‘the feminine’ were indeed elastic enough that writers could, for some decades, argue that acting, working, and learning positively facilitated its development. Having said this, it is difficult for a writer to characterize a homebound girl as ‘useless lumber’ and yet retain an essential commitment to the doctrine of separate spheres, as did ‘One of Them’ in ‘The Girls of To-Day’: it is not impossible, clearly, but it is certainly difficult. There is a logical inconsistency which even the most reconciliatory political agenda must struggle to manage. In the later part of this section we shall see how this type of difficulty manifests itself in some women’s romance fictions of the period—how writers battled as their unwillingness to endorse marriage as the be-all-and-end-all of a young woman’s existence led them, inexorably, to the very borders of rejecting contemporary gender hierarchies. Indeed, potentially the greatest threat to the ideology of separate spheres came from those conservative writers struggling their hardest to maintain and defend the status quo in the face of modern developments—struggling, but obviously failing. This discussion will be contextualized first by

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analysis of New Women’s depictions of personal growth: examinations of feminist awakenings to consciousness will serve both to highlight the relationships between these texts and earlier conservative representations of girlhood, and to identify the tensions in fin de siècle romance writers’ accounts of the transition to womanhood.58 New Woman texts often locate their scenes of awakening outdoors. In Grand’s The Beth Book, the heroine’s first conscious thought is produced by contact with the natural world: ‘It was the sunshine really that first called her into conscious existence.’ Beth is awakened to subjectivity by sensory experience, by the feeling of warmth on her skin; intense corporeal experiences are often key in such scenes. In Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, for example, a walk amongst countryside flowers initiates a new awareness of self in Evadne: She had thought herself early up, but the whole wild world of the heath was before her, and she began to feel belated as she went . . . she picked some yellow blooms with delicate finger tips, and carried them in her bare hand savouring the scent . . . till presently the enthusiasm of nature called forth some further faculty, and she found herself sensible of every tint and tone, sight and sound, distinguishing, deciphering . . . (Twins, 45–6)

Suzanne Raitt notes that women’s growth to consciousness is often articulated in relation to nature in the works of twentieth-century women writers, such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. Raitt stresses that encounters with the natural world frame scenes of female identity formation: In much women’s autobiography, mysticism is seen as the beginning of the whole problem, the engendering of subjectivity itself. Women’s autobio58 In this section I characterize New Women’s awakenings to consciousness as ‘positive’, although this is not to suggest that they are always happy; indeed, they are often distressing and tragic. I continue to term them ‘positive’, however, because—as we shall see—New Women generally believed that a world of gender equality would bring happiness. The romance writers I examine rarely possessed this saving sense of optimism in the future. I use this difference as one means of distinguishing between romance and New Woman texts, a distinction that—as I have already indicated—I myself find difficult to maintain, since the politics of all the texts under discussion are profoundly complex, conflicted, and conflicting. Many New Woman texts centre on romantic relationships, and many romance texts are supportive of women’s entrance into the public and political spheres. The distinction I develop here must be understood, then, as merely one tool in the feminist literary critics’ kit; I view all of these texts as occupying one long political continuum, and I position them at various points along the continuum based on my judgements about their overriding political purposes and social and political assumptions.

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graphical self-construction often takes as its point of departure a moment of almost extra-corporeal intensity . . . A mystical experience is located as the initiation of a sense of identity, the origin to which subsequent developments are always accountable.59

Beth’s experience in Grand’s novel can be related, then, to scenes of dawning consciousness in twentieth-century women’s texts, although they must also be related to accounts of growth in a host of Victorian women’s novels. Mrs Gore’s Progress and Prejudice describes its heroine’s seventeenth birthday in terms that resonate with those Grand employs in The Heavenly Twins: The summer grass was high;—noisy with insects, fragrant with clover, and enamelled with the blue blossoms of the wild veronica. All was gay, all was sweet; as if to do honour to the auspicious epoch of Amy’s birthday. It was the seventeenth she had spent upon that self-same spot. But of those within her memory, which had been so bright as this? . . . The one great gift of liberty,—the right of being allowed, henceforward, to think and feel for herself,—to think and feel as a woman, superseded all other joys . . . (Progress and Prejudice, i. 7–8, 11).

Consciousness of the natural world again leads to consciousness of self, of Amy’s own nature; the walk outside becomes a quasi-mystical experience in which, as Grand puts it, the girl’s ‘whole being blossomed into gladness’ and ‘her senses awoke’ (Twins, 46). Nature is so important during a young woman’s growth to adulthood, Simone de Beauvoir has argued, because it represents a sphere that is socially unmapped; it becomes a sanctuary in which a girl can evade the construction of her gender that comes, inexorably, with womanhood: At home, mother, law, custom, routine hold sway, and she would fain escape these aspects of her past; she would in her turn become a sovereign subject. But, as a member of society, she enters upon adult life only in becoming a woman; she pays for her liberation by an abdication. Whereas among plants and animals she is a human being . . . She finds in the secret places of the forest a reflection of the solitude of her soul and in the wide horizons of the plains a tangible image of her transcendence . . . To have a body no longer seems a blemish to be ashamed of; in the desires that under the maternal eye the girl repudiates, she can recognise the sap that rises in the trees; she is no longer accursed . . .60 59 Suzanne Raitt, Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 132. 60 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949; London: Picador, 1988), 386–7.

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Grand’s novels may draw—like Caird’s Whom Nature Leadeth—on an imperialist rhetoric of the insurgent self, the unmapped terra incognita, in their representation of Nature calling to nature, but they seem as conscious as Beauvoir of the ways in which the outdoors can provide a productive, fruitful scene for feminine self-construction. ‘The next step in [Beth’s] awakening was to a kind of selfconsciousness’, Grand continues in The Beth Book: ‘She was lying on her nurse’s lap out of doors, looking up at the sky, and some one was saying, “Oh, you pretty thing!” But it was long years before she connected the phrase with herself, although she smiled in response to the voice that uttered it’ (Beth, 10). Grand stresses here and throughout the early pages of her novel the sophistication of a woman’s growth, the intricate and multiple stages needed to create a sentient being. Her message is clear: ‘the mysterious growth of [a] moral and intellectual being’ deserves society’s reverence (Beth, 11). Yet, inevitably, Beth must continue in her development with little aid, little effort to shape either the intellectual or the moral aspects of her self. Like Carey’s Dollie, who compares her life to a ‘stagnant old mill stream’, Beth’s life is therefore sluggish and unregulated: Because she was a girl, Beth’s intellect had been left to stagnate for want of proper occupation or to run riot in any vain pursuit she might happen upon by accident, while her senses were allowed to have their way, unrestrained by any but the vaguest principles. Thanks to her free roving outdoor habits, her life was healthy if it were not happy, and she promised to mature early. Youth and sex already began to hang out their signals—clear skin, slim figure, light step, white teeth, thick hair, bright eyes. She was approaching her blossoming time, the end of her wintry childhood, the beginning of a promising spring. (Beth, 233)

The natural, organic development of a young woman in the process of becoming an adult is paired with a second awakening—one that is equally intricate, but infinitely more painful. This is caused by the lack of guidance in Beth’s life—by, for example, her mother’s unwillingness to talk to the teenage Beth about sex. The older woman is subsequently horrified to learn that Beth has kissed men before her engagement. “‘Well, mamma, it if were wicked, why didn’t you warn me?”’ Beth enquires. ‘“How was I to know?’” ‘“Your womanly instincts ought to have taught you better”’, her mother replies (Beth, 335).61 Yet, as Grand emphasizes, ‘womanly instincts’ may 61 The idea that girls should be protected by ‘instincts’ alone was relatively common. One doctor assured his readers that ‘A young woman whose mind is pure and

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well teach a girl something quite different: a happy, healthy young woman, used to roaming in nature, will probably ‘recognise the sap that rises in the trees’, as Simone de Beauvoir euphemistically puts it. Grand, indeed, works to legitimize a girl’s early sexual interest—to describe it as a natural part of the maturational process: ‘It was natural and right that [Beth’s] pulses should quicken and her spirits rise when a young man met her with a friendly glance’ (Beth, 233). Yet Beth lives in late Victorian England, and, confronted with the ways in which premarital sexual activity is viewed, she finds herself cowed into marriage. Her husband, a doctor, is far from sympathetic; quickly, therefore, ‘the vision and the dream’ of love is exterminated (Beth, 338). He opens her letters, and the want of privacy in her life frustrates her; his sexual desires, meanwhile, repulse her (he keeps up ‘an incessant billing and cooing, and of a coarser kind, which soon satiated her’ (Beth, 343)). Finally she discovers that he is a vivisectionist: the cries she has heard deep in the house turn out to belong, not to a Bertha Mason-like madwoman, but rather to a suffering terrier. As the first half of the novel has tracked Beth’s ‘natural’ growth to womanhood, so the second half of the novel narrates her traumatic accession to knowledge—knowledge of her husband’s ‘coarse’ sexual proclivities, of his physical and professional cruelty, and of the social system that allows young girls to enter into marriages with little or no information about the life they will presently lead. Given that adulthood brings such painful knowledge, New Woman texts often indicate that heroines long to remain in the peaceful shelter of childhood—to sidestep the transition to womanhood. Muriel Ménie Dowie’s Gallia actively revolts against maturation in her late teens: Gallia had developed late; at seventeen she was a tall girl rather than a young woman . . . When femininity descended upon her, there was a struggle; she did not want it; was prepared to do without it; found it an added source of puzzlement to life, which was already a hotbed of complications for her; and, as all late-developed women do, resented it fiercely; fought separately and subdued every sign of it. (Gallia, 66–7)62 free from unhallowed desires is perfectly safe from temptation . . . Such a person would detect and instantly repel the very first advances of an impure character.’ J. H. Kellogg, Ladies’ Guide to Health and Disease—Girlhood, Maidenhood, Wifehood, Motherhood (London: Pacific Press Publishing, 1890), 328–9. 62 Muriel Ménie Dowie, Gallia (London: Methuen, 1895).

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In The Heavenly Twins, Grand stresses Evadne’s ambivalence about ‘coming out’: ‘the self-consciousness had to come. She approached the verge of womanhood. She was made to do up her hair. She was encouraged to think of being presented, coming out, and having a home of her own eventually’ (Twins, 24). Evadne is thus introduced, precipitately, to the duties of womanhood—to the centrality of marriage in her life; like Beth, however, she is not introduced to information about the history of the man to whom she is presently affianced. When she discovers the truth about Major Colquhoun’s past life on her wedding day, Evadne is horrified and refuses to live with him. She stresses the iniquity of uniting chaste girls to sexually experienced men, and argues that young women must at least be given the knowledge to make informed decisions before they ally themselves to one man for life. Her aunt, Mrs Orton Beg, is horrified by Evadne’s proposal: ‘It is best to submit. It is better not to know.’ ‘It is easier to submit—yes; it is disagreeable to know,’ Evadne translated. There was another pause, then Mrs Orton Beg broke out: ‘Don’t make me think about it. Surely I have suffered enough? Disagreeable to know! It is torture. If I ever let myself dwell on the horrible depravity that goes on unchecked, the depravity which you say we women license by ignoring it when we should face and unmask it, I should go out of mind.’ (Twins, 80–1)

The plot surrounding the novel’s second heroine similarly stresses both ‘the depravity’ in the world at large and the importance of knowing, no matter how disagreeable: Edith is given syphilis by her libertine husband, gives birth to a diseased child, goes mad, and finally dies. There is, therefore, no alternative to acquiring knowledge of sexual misconduct, Grand suggests; in this world of disease and libertinism, girls must inform themselves about their prospective husbands’ morality. In this she echoes Mrs Crackanthorpe who, noting that most mothers would be ‘exceedingly shocked’ if their daughter asked ‘to be assured that the man she was about to marry had no “past” to bury’, concludes: ‘And yet here the girl’s instinct is surely a right one . . .’63 Representations of the growth to womanhood as a time of pain, trauma, and unwelcome knowledge must remind us of a host of women’s popular fictions examined in this book: novels such as Sylvan Holt’s Daughter, The Morals of Mayfair, and The Countess’s 63

Crackanthorpe, ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’, 29.

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Cross similarly succeed epiphanic scenes of self-pleasuring in nature with scenes in which ‘the realities of life’ unpleasantly intrude. Indeed, even the concern with a husband’s unwelcome sexual attentions, evident in so many New Woman novels, has precedent in women’s popular fictions: Gertrude in The Countess’s Cross and Josephine in Into Temptation are every bit as repulsed by the caresses of their spouses as Beth is by her husband’s ‘coarse’ whispers. Yet New Woman novels, unlike these texts, are able to conceive a more positive vision of the future: whereas many women’s romance fictions conclude either with death or with an ambiguously happy marriage, New Woman novels look towards a world in which the social and cultural demotion of marriage is a source of personal contentment and social harmony. This investment in the future, moreover, provides compensation for the pain of awakening—a theme exemplified in Kate Chopin’s ‘Emancipation: A Life Fable’. The short story describes the day on which a beast, confined in a comfortable cage, discovers that the door to his prison has been left open. Confused and uncertain, he is tempted by ‘the spell of the Unknown’ and finally bounds out: ‘On he rushes, in his mad flight, heedless that he is wounding and tearing his sleek sides—seeing, smelling, touching of all things; even stopping to put his lips to the noxious pool, thinking it may be sweet . . . So does he live, seeking, finding, joying and suffering.’ The last word is important in this context—the beast suffers—but once he has experienced the joy of liberty he can never return to his cage.64 For Chopin, as for so many late Victorian feminists, the sense of potential ahead was the compensation for the immediate pain of awakening: certainly it is disagreeable to know and easy to submit, but knowledge must come and will, eventually, yield its rewards.65 For some conservative writers of women’s romances, on the other hand, the 1890s was clearly a difficult time. Influenced, perhaps, by the works of contemporary New Women, a number of romance authors similarly centred on the trauma of marriage, the discovery of sexual double standards, and the pain, for a girl, of being forced to realize ‘the depravity’ of the world. Unable to close their narratives with marriage yet unable, equally, to authorize the full-scale dismantling 64 Kate Chopin, ‘Emancipation: A Life Fable’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (London: Virago, 1993), 306–7. 65 For further discussion see Showalter, Introduction, Daughters of Decadence, esp. pp. xviii–xix.

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of the ideology of separate spheres, texts slip into a desperately pessimistic approach to life, love, and the future. Aimée Daniell Beringer’s The New Virtue (1896) engages, like so many New Woman texts, with the insidious idea that ‘womanly instincts’ alone will protect a girl from sexual threat—that ignorance is the best means of shaping a girl’s ‘moral and intellectual’ life. ‘What danger could possibly assail Margaret, brought up on Granny’s infallible system of ignorance?’ she inquires, sarcastically; Was she not encased in the impregnable armour of a brown holland pinafore and a pig-tail? She was a child, and, according to Granny, would, of course, remain one until the crucial moment should arrive when Mrs Grundy cries ‘Hey presto, change! Exit holland pinafore. Enter a woman!’ (The New Virtue, 10)66

Beringer’s extraordinary novel represents the disastrous consequences of Granny’s system in highly wrought tones and images. Echoing not only the texts of Grand and Egerton but also Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Beringer portrays an innocent young girl’s sexual experience and pregnancy (Margaret’s armour was not so ‘impregnable’ after all), her marriage, her rejection by and reconciliation with her husband. In spite of the novel’s preoccupation with sex and sexual activity it is, politically, towards the conservative end of the spectrum: while Beringer abhors the ways in which girls have been brought up, she continues to support traditional concepts of gender-appropriate behaviour and the separation of public and private spheres. Furthermore, at key moments in the text the more scandalous events are submerged beneath a weighty layer of metaphor and innuendo, leaving the reader to infer, to decode, and (probably) to remain confused. Margaret lives with her guardian’s mother at Ingpen in ‘the land of pure air’ (NV 8). Like so many heroines, she is happiest in nature: at the start of the novel, her doctor insists that she be ‘banished from the hothouse atmosphere’ of London and taken instead to Ingpen to ‘“run wild in the open”’ (NV 8). Margaret is also a devoted reader and, the author emphasizes, she has only benefited from her private reading experiences: ‘she drank in long, never-satisfying draughts of wonderful literary vintages which thrilled and fired her warm blood, but left no poison behind’ (NV 7). This peaceful childhood is 66 ‘Mrs Oscar Beringer’ (Aimée Daniell Beringer), The New Virtue (London: William Heinemann, 1896), hereafter referenced parenthetically as NV.

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abruptly shattered on her sixteenth birthday. Margaret is given a pearl necklace by her guardian, Lady Serena Arbuthnot, and the reader knows calamity is around the corner when Serena warns her, ‘“It is time you should learn not to lose what is most precious to you”’ (NV 12). Margaret immediately rushes off to see herself in the full-length mirror, and is oddly affected by the ‘curious picture’ of a girl in child’s clothes, with ‘eager, deep-set eyes, dark and aflame’ and the pearl necklace round her neck: ‘With an impatient gesture Margaret clasped her throat as if the silence suffocated her’ (NV 13). This image of sudden self-awareness, of a new vision, is left hanging. Immediately afterwards, Margaret finds a copy of Thackeray’s The Esmonds, ‘As luck willed it’ (NV 13). Margaret’s epiphanic ‘awakening’ takes place while she reads, rather than while she romps in the garden but—like Evadne’s walk—the moment of awakening is intensely sensory. And, as she starts to experience her reading physically, so Margaret becomes newly conscious of her self: Whether by the power of the enchanter’s wand or the receptiveness of her own mood, [the characters] all lived and moved and breathed for her. With newly-awakened intuition she dimly scented the scintillating, wicked atmosphere which worked Beatrice’s undoing. She felt her pulses stir under the lash of the biting sarcasm and the vivid picture of man’s baseness and woman’s frailty. She could define nothing, embody nothing; but here at last were colour, movement, sound, life, everything for which she longed with an inarticulate pain which choked its own utterance. Hour after hour slipped by in fevered enchantment, until the book fell with a crash on the floor. A long indrawn breath relieved her tension, and her hand went up to her throat. ‘I wish—’ she began wistfully . . . (NV 13)

Throughout the century, commentators feared the influence of fiction on women and particularly girls; here the vivid, sensual possibilities of reading are celebrated. Intriguingly, Margaret is stimulated by Thackeray and not by, say, New Woman fictions which, late Victorian commentators feared, were likely to corrupt young girls.67 In the same year that The New Virtue was published, Annie S. Swan in The Woman at Home warned mothers to regulate their daughters’ access to modern fiction, ‘else she will have her standing handicapped at the very threshold of life’; W. T. Stead argued: ‘What will be the end of all this kind of writing upon girls who are just flowering into 67 For discussion of these fears see Flint, Woman Reader; ch. 11 focuses on the dangers of New Woman novels in particular.

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womanhood?’68 Beringer both celebrates the effects of reading and indicates that there is little point in regulating a girl’s literary consumption; her heroine, it seems, is just as likely to be influenced by a respectable male author as by a transgressive New Woman. Moreover, instead of inhibiting or perverting Margaret’s development, her reading leads to a stimulating new awareness of self and of life. (One feels that Tess, who famously mourned her lack of access to fiction, would have benefited from this experience.) Beringer, it is true, equivocates as to how far Margaret’s new perspective is inspired by the text itself, how far it is initiated by an outside force, and how far it stems from her ‘own mood’: the reader is also left wondering whether this mood is innate, whether it originates from the pearls, or whether it stems from her self-examination in the mirror. Declining to be drawn into these questions, Beringer also prevents us from hearing what it is that Margaret wishes; at this interesting moment, the butler comes to take her into lunch. Yet whatever Beringer leaves unsaid, it is clear none the less that Margaret’s reading opens the way to a new self-awareness—that it forms what Raitt called ‘the initiation of a sense of identity, the origin to which subsequent developments are always accountable’. For we learn in the following pages that Margaret is developing an awareness of her sexuality. Shortly after receiving the necklace, Margaret goes to meet Teddy, her childhood companion, who immediately notices a difference in her: ‘“You’re changed. What is it?”’ (NV 16). He gives her a bracelet for her birthday, which she puts on—and then she suddenly turns to him: ‘I know what has happened, I know what is the matter. I am grown up at last!’ And quickly turning, she loosened her hair from the tight plait in which it was bound, and coiling the copper glory round and round her head, faced him. The transformation was complete. As if by magic there stood before him a wonderful apparition, dowered with the beauty of newly-awakened womanhood. Her eyes gleamed dimly with the mystery of half-divined potentialities. Her trembling lips were parted like a babe’s, eager to drink at its mother’s breast. Round throat and wrist lay coiled, in curious contrast to her dewy freshness, the symbols of sale and barter. (NV 17) 68 Annie S. Swan, ‘What Women Should Read’, The Woman At Home, 37 (1896), 31; W. T. Stead, ‘The Book of the Month: The Novel of the Modern Woman’, Review of Reviews, 10 (1894), 73. I owe these references to Flint, Woman Reader, 307, 297.

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Notably, Beringer retains the idea of a transformation: heigh presto, Margaret is suddenly changed into a woman by the device of a few pieces of jewellery and a new hairstyle. However, here the change is initiated not by Mrs Grundy but by Margaret herself. She heightens her own sexual appeal by loosening her hair from its childish plait for Teddy, and she emphasizes that she is a woman by putting it ‘up’: both Teddy and the reader consequently see a dawning sense of ‘halfdivined potentialities’ in her eyes. Margaret is a ‘babe’ and a transgressive woman simultaneously; she is Eve, or perhaps Cleopatra, with the symbols of the market-place ‘coiled’ like snakes around her throat and wrist. Like Le Fanu’s Carmilla, like Dracula’s Lamia at the end of the decade, Margaret is both symbol and reality, an ‘apparition’ and a thing of flesh. She both represents, and is, a disconcertingly sexual being. Yet although Beringer encircles her heroine with tropes of dangerous sexual womanhood, she insists that the girl is actually sexually ignorant. Indeed, she firmly distinguishes between a girl’s consciousness of sexuality (which, like Grand, she presents as innate) and knowledge of sex itself. The rest of the text may be read as a critique of the division between the two; of the fact that Victorian society insisted upon preserving all sexual knowledge from girls who were developing nubile bodies and sexual desires. Margaret’s sensuality leads her into Tess-like trouble because she does not understand that ‘there [is] danger in men-folk’ (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 131).69 Indeed, to underscore her heroine’s innocence of sexual matters, Beringer succeeds the picture of Margaret as Lamia with a personification of her heroine as ‘Ignorance erect, fearless, glowing, beautiful’. Meanwhile Teddy, the childhood friend, becomes ‘Knowledge downcast, with averted eyes, and pale, indrawn lips . . .’ (NV 18). Caught in a thunderstorm while out for a ride with Teddy, Margaret wants to take cover. Teddy initially attempts to avert the impending disaster, fully conscious of his own desires: ‘“don’t you see —can’t you feel that there is more danger for us in the summer-house than all the—”’ (NV 20). Margaret doesn’t see at all, and Teddy doesn’t try very hard to explain it to her. In fact, even though he seems to understand that Margaret has no idea what lies ahead, he takes her insistence on going to the summer-house as tacit agreement to have sex with him: ‘“Come, then,” he whispered softly . . . “You 69 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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will never blame me, Margaret?” he asked wistfully’ (NV 20). In fact, as Beringer’s description makes clear, the ‘mating’ that follows is an outright rape of Margaret (NV 24): Margaret recoiled. She no longer knew the face of her friend in this pale, distorted vision of passion, with strange burning eyes and trembling lips . . . ‘Margaret,’ she heard the strange tones murmur, ‘will you shut the door of this paradise to me?’ And as in a dream she heard her own voice in agonised reply— ‘I don’t know—I don’t understand! Pity—pity—what is it?’ The hut was illumined as if by the light of day, and with a loud crash one of the giants of the forest fell athwart the moss-grown roof, struck to the heart with mortal wound. An agony as merciless, and as fatal, thrilled Margaret’s innermost being. She lay prone, struck down by mortal hand. (NV 24)

Apart from the explicit description of Margaret’s resistance, the terms of the falling tree seem to express metaphorically Teddy’s ‘wounding’ of Margaret; the ‘agony’ in her ‘innermost being’ seems even more telling. Teddy is immediately afterwards felled himself by a bolt of lightning as he rides to get help for the now-unconscious Margaret. Coming round during his absence, the heroine tries to put back her broken string of pearls and finds (in Hawthornian fashion) that ‘One pearl was lost for ever’ (NV 24). Beringer’s construction of the rape scene depends upon Margaret’s complete ignorance of Teddy’s intentions—which, she is at pains to suggest, hardly preserves a girl from a determined rapist. ‘Womanly instincts’ may involve consciousness of sensuality, but they do not introduce information about ‘depravity’ to a young woman’s conscious mind. Indeed, Beringer seems keen to stress that sex is a strictly physical (not intellectual or emotional) experience for her heroine: Margaret doesn’t understand what has happened and continues to behave as before. This provides the tension in the rest of the novel. Henry Bethune, a close friend of Margaret’s guardian, sees the girl as a model of purity and innocence and marries her; Beringer’s analysis of Bethune’s horror on discovering Margaret’s pregnancy clearly owes much to Hardy’s plea for another ‘pure woman’ in this decade. Margaret’s unconsciousness after the rape seems designed to stress the potential purity of a girl who has had sex: her process of maturation, her dawning reconception of self, is effectively stilled in the service of this political message. Margaret becomes a cipher, a Ruth-

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like paragon of virtue, suffering her husband’s rejection with passive bewilderment. Like The Heavenly Twins, the novel is suffused with a sense of sexual threat—the threat posed by men to women, and the ways in which women are ill-prepared to face that threat. Yet it is not clear what structural social changes Beringer is hoping for: she clearly abhors ‘Granny’s system’, but her sympathy for the heroine in the later stages of the novel depends on Margaret’s embodiment of the angelic ideal. Beringer does not endorse—say—Tess’s eventual slaying of the man who raped her, or even Evadne’s clear-sighted effort to reconfigure the relations between men and women. Ultimately she seems to prefer Gaskell’s tacit encomium in Ruth: women may be sexually exploited and brutalized, but at least they can take the moral high ground. The initially positive vision of the future in Emilia Aylmer Blake’s An Unruly Spirit (1890) also fades as the novel progresses, derailed by the fact that Blake too is unable to manage the problem of male sexual misconduct. Blake’s tragic text, like Beringer’s, is again difficult to place politically: the narrative partially endorses an ideal of marriage based on male dominance and pursues a familiar critique of the enervating effects of Mammon on the purity of a young girl. However, it also celebrates the heroine’s ‘brilliant prospects’ in the ‘congenial labour’ of Girton with great spirit, applauding its heroine’s eventual success: Gladys ‘won her honours, and passed very high on the list of girl graduates at Girton’ (An Unruly Spirit, iii. 80, 135).70 The highly unsympathetic Lady Carranmore, Gladys’s mother, is portrayed as backward and reactionary for espousing views about the effects of higher education on women’s reproductive capacities: ‘“no woman of condition works her brains like a slave—it might prevent her from having children.” Lady Carranmore’s tone had fallen to a terrified whisper . . .’ (US, i. 68). The novel’s progressive politics also produce a genuinely unusual hero: Edgar advises his fiancée to stand out against her mother and go to university. Although his motivations are slightly unclear (his advice may be based on a desire to have her near him in Cambridge), he firmly defends the higher education of women. When Gladys tells Edgar that she fears parental opposition to the plan—‘“My mother will say no: she says that Girton unsexes women . . .”’—he insists, ‘“She is all wrong”’ 70 Emilia Aylmer Blake, An Unruly Spirit, 3 vols. (London: F. V. White, 1890), hereafter referenced parenthetically as US.

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(US i. 136). Blake proceeds to demonstrate precisely how Girton fails to ‘unsex’ a woman; that is to say, how the experience both fails to impinge on a girl’s authentic femininity and how it subsequently produces marriageable women. In the first place we see Gladys’s ‘unusual’ lack of interest in her appearance—her lack of artifice, of selfconsciousness: Gladys had grown up to the brink of the river where ‘womanhood and childhood meet,’ in unnatural indifference to the business that fills so many lives, and exercises so strong an influence over the fate of most of her sex, the mundus muliebris, or woman’s world—the art of adornment and attractive grace in fashion and form. (US i. 213–14)

Annie Edwardes’s Marguerite similarly reached 16 although ‘it had never entered into her head, or that of her father, that she was approaching the age of womanhood . . .’ (The Morals of Mayfair, i. 9); Violet Douglas hovered on the ‘point where she had seemed to stand for so long—longer than most girls, perhaps—“with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet”’ (Violet Douglas, 253). Yet the preference for girlish unselfconsciousness was no longer the preserve of conservative writers in the 1890s, as we have seen: novels like Gallia and The Heavenly Twins also criticize the ways in which maturation brings a forced awareness of sexuality, of one’s self as a commodity to be purchased in marriage. And indeed, when Gladys is attired, in spite of herself, in a ball-dress, the narrator comments bitterly: ‘She was dressed for conquest amongst men . . .’ (US i. 216). As in Beringer’s novel, the disaster has to come. For, like the author of The New Virtue, Blake is keen to stress that Gladys’s lack of vanity and self-consciousness renders her ill-equipped for the modern adult world. After Edgar becomes tempted to infidelity by a married woman, named Alexis, he begs his fiancée to drop her dreams of Girton and marry him, apparently so that he will be safe from future temptation. His explicit argument is, however, specious: ‘“Think of us two meeting at lectures in Cambridge, and bowing to one another—we must not speak. It is beyond me to bear it . . .”’ (US ii. 223). The plot falters at this point: Gladys appears to agree (‘“Well, if you insist upon it, Eddie”’ (US ii. 226)), but by the beginning of the third volume she is installed at Girton. Alexis, who hopes to divorce her first husband, is now trying to trap Edgar into marriage, and Edgar consequently begs Gladys to marry him immediately: ‘“Do not delay, as—as something may happen”’ (US iii. 68).

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He is unable to name the impending disaster to Gladys, and she is unable to understand the danger until she receives a more detailed letter from Edgar’s mother, Mary Penrice, in which she learns that Alexis has ‘led him into a great sin’: ‘He asks you to do an angel’s part, to forgive, and shorten the days of separation between you. This is our wish too. Once married to you he will be safe from all schemes to betray him into unfaithfulness, and your husband, redeemed by your generous love, will be as true and dear to you as his father and I have been to each other. Edgar is young, and men are not as we are. Take my assurance of this . . .’ Gladys dropped the letter, and wept over her slain girlhood. The thrust of pain and bitter knowledge had killed the bud of love, and now, a woman, broken-hearted, sank crushed upon the ground, and buried her face in an agony of shame. (US iii. 70–1)

Clearly implying that Mr Penrice has himself erred and been forgiven, this letter echoes the mother’s warning—that ‘men are not as we are’—in George Egerton’s short story, ‘Virgin Soil’. Gladys is similarly taught that ‘an angel’s part’ is, as Egerton later put it, to ‘dry-nurse his morality’, to take responsibility for her lover’s sins (‘Virgin Soil’ 155).71 She does not: while Edgar assures her that the matter will be most effectively ‘“hushed up”’ through their marriage (US iii. 72), Gladys decides to take more time to consider her position and continues with her education. Meanwhile, Edgar is finally forced to marry Alexis, having been cited by her husband in the divorce. While Gladys achieves a good degree, Edgar has to leave Cambridge. The novel does not end happily. In spite of Gladys’s intellectual achievements and the progressive politics that underscore much of the novel’s action, Blake reanimates the ethic of absolute daughterly submission in the third volume. She marries Gladys off to a man the girl loathes: Lady Carranmore desires the match, and Gladys virtuously capitulates. The marriage is, of course, a disaster: Gladys finds her husband’s sexual advances unbearable (‘the cheeks and lips he kissed were icy chill, while his pulses throbbed with fire’ (US iii. 184)). As with Marguerite St John in The Morals of Mayfair, an underlying heart complaint is subsequently revealed, a complaint that unhappiness worsens. Lying close to death, she blames her mother for enjoining her submission and for failing to inform her 71 ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne), ‘Virgin Soil’, Keynotes and Discords (1894; London: Virago, 1995), 145–62.

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about the realities of marriage: ‘“I have tried. I cannot—cannot live with him as a wife . . . Oh, mother, mother! you led me on. I did not know what I was doing until too late, and now I must die!”’ (US iii. 203). In previous decades, girls awakened to knowledge of sex and immorality through narratives of long-concealed maternal misdemeanours; in the 1890s, narratives typically focus on the men who lead fallen women astray. Yet they continue to engage criticism of mothers, although the treachery is usually represented rather differently: rather than themselves falling, mothers are represented as those who most culpably betray their daughters’ own interests. In The New Virtue, for instance, we learn that Serena Arbuthnot, Margaret’s guardian, was herself misled by her mother into marriage. When, as a girl, she told her mother she found the idea of her fiancé’s kisses repugnant, ‘Granny’ ‘brought fiery blushes to her cheeks by demanding what well-brought-up young woman ever anticipated a caress, or allowed her thoughts to dwell on such subjects’: But how often did she not awaken in those dreadful nights preceding her marriage, faint, trembling, and sick with a fear which she could not embody in words. The awakening came.... But with the true instinct of a courageous woman, she buried her degradation, and tried to efface all its traces, and to persuade the world that she had been the gainer, instead of the loser, in the bargain which had been struck. (NV 30)

Egerton’s bride in ‘Virgin Soil’ similarly begs her mother, before her wedding, to explain what will happen that night: ‘“There is something more—I have felt it all these last weeks in your and the others’ looks—in his, in the very atmosphere—but why have you not told me before—I—”’ (‘Virgin Soil’, 146). The mother fails to describe intercourse to her daughter, or indeed the hierarchical relation between husband and wife in Victorian society. The girl returns five years later, ill and furious, to tell her mother why she is leaving her husband: ‘I simply did not know what I was signing my name to, or what I was vowing to do. I might as well have signed my name to a document drawn up in Choctaw’, she concludes (‘Virgin Soil’, 154). Elaine Showalter, noting the prevalence of such scenes in New Woman fiction (particularly, indeed, in Egerton’s work) argues that it represents ‘a repressed sex-antagonism in human relationships, which women had to project into a variety of destructive behaviours because they were afraid to confront its true source . . . the struggle is

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not between mothers and daughters, but between husbands and wives’. She concludes that the ‘avoidance of these central confrontations’ constitutes a serious failure: ‘Given the freedom to explore their experience, they rejected it, or at least tried to deny it.’72 However, it must be remembered that serious disagreements between mothers and daughters were a tradition in women’s fictions— a tradition that (as I argued in Chapter 1) represents an effort to modify the cycle of female identification. Daughters do not wish simply to become like their mothers in the texts examined here; scenes of conflict between the generations can be read, therefore, as symbolic (as well as sometimes actual) engagements with the maintenance and perpetuation of the gender status quo. Egerton’s young bride stammers as she asks her mother for illumination, a rhetorical strategy on the author’s part to foreground the heroine’s youthful confusion and vulnerability. Another novel, published in the same year as The Heavenly Twins, similarly centres on a young girl’s desire ‘to know’, to understand the ways of the world; yet here the stammering voice of 19-year-old Bee Kingsward is closely allied with that of the narrator and, one suspects, the author herself. Margaret Oliphant’s The Sorceress (1894) describes how a girl is shocked into disillusioned adulthood when she discovers her fiancé’s (apparently) chequered sexual past: ‘“One before —and one after . . . Am I to come in between—two others—two,— I think it will make me mad . . . How does a man dare to do that, to insult a girl . . .”’ (The Sorceress, 115).73 The situation Bee faces is startlingly familiar: realizing that some mystery surrounds the man of her choice, she struggles to discover the truth about his conduct. Her parents, however, inform her that her engagement must be broken off without telling her why. Seeing the facts of the case as through a glass, darkly, Bee ‘could not fathom what was meant. That there was something more than met the eye, something that was not put into words, seemed to show vaguely through the words that were said, but what it was Bee could not tell’ (S 52). Oliphant’s tone, unlike Egerton’s, is rarely polemical: she resists the contemporary political implications of her text by locating the action in ‘the early days of Victoria’ (S 6). However, as the text progresses, Oliphant— 72 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977; London: Virago, 1978), 212, 214, 215. 73 Margaret Oliphant, The Sorceress (1893; London: F. V. White, 1894), hereafter referenced parenthetically as S.

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perhaps unintentionally—slips into commentary on ‘modern life’ and ‘the present generation’, revealing how far the action is in fact rooted in the present social and political moment. And, like her New Woman sisters, Oliphant places the conflict over knowledge in a series of dialogues between mother and daughter. Bee approaches her mother to ask for the full story, but Mrs Kingsward keeps trying to hug her; to silence her. Bee resists these caresses: ‘“don’t pet me; I cannot bear it. Let me stand by myself. I am not a little thing . . . to be caught up and kissed till I forget. I don’t want to forget”’ (S 116). Like Evadne (‘It was a need of her nature to know’), Bee wants not to go back to her former state, but to understand more fully. Resisting her mother’s attempts to draw her in, to comfort her, Bee insists on her adult status and on some physical and emotional distance from her mother. For indeed, the two are ranged on opposite sides of this contemporary debate: while Bee is disgusted by the idea of Aubrey’s sexual incontinence, her mother argues, rather incoherently, ‘“What went before could be no offence to you, whatever it was. It might be bad, but it was no offence to you”’ (S 116). Mrs Kingsward, like Grand’s Mrs Orton Beg or Egerton’s mother figure in ‘Virgin Soil’, hopes to sweep disquieting realities under the carpet. It is not clear where Oliphant locates herself in this debate. The narrative expresses considerable sympathy for Mrs Kingsward as she struggles to find the words to cope with this oddly characteristic modern situation; Bee ultimately causes herself a great deal of pain for nothing, since it transpires that Aubrey is, after all, virtuous. The text subsequently suppresses the debate it has initiated. The dialogues between Bee and her mother are abruptly checked when Mrs Kingsward becomes ill and dies shortly afterwards: this silences Bee and stifles her investigations (‘her mother’s illness came in to fill up every thought’ (S 118)). Thus although Oliphant represents the painful experience of half-knowledge, she seems to find it impossible to resolve the problem by assigning a more complete understanding to her heroine: similarly, she portrays a breakdown in the mother/ daughter relationship but then sends the mother into a terminal illness that reignites Bee’s filial docility. Having awakened Bee, it seems Oliphant does not quite know what to do with her. On the one hand, when the girl takes over the care of the family after her mother’s death, Oliphant criticizes the kind of self-abnegation practised by Margaret in Yonge’s The Daisy Chain: ‘Her duty! Could anything be

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more fantastic, more impossible? To take her mother’s place . . . to humour the stern father, to take care of the tribe of children, to be their nurse, their ruler—everything that a creature of nineteen could not, should not be!’ (S 150).74 Yet, on the other hand, the novel lacks a clear definition of what a girl could or should be. The narrator’s sense of the future is bleak, given the exigencies of modern circumstances. Considering the image of Bee as a young wife, she concludes despairingly that ‘even this idea has ceased to be satisfactory to the present generation . . . She seemed to have come to an end of all possibilities’ (S 276). The three romance novels discussed here share with contemporary New Woman texts a sense of the transition to womanhood as a point of trauma: the accession to adulthood, the awakening, is finally achieved through pain and disappointment. In the 1890s, pain stems from the realization of sexual double standards and male sexual incontinence, and in this novels reflect a broader contemporary concern with ‘immoral’ sexual practices. William Stead’s infamous articles on the ‘white slave trade’ in the Pall Mall Gazette pictured aristocratic men as the sexually rapacious consumers of foolish young girls; Catherine Robson has argued that the raising of the age of consent in the aftermath of Stead’s articles expressed not only a comparatively new consciousness on society’s part of prostitution, but also distress at the idea of 14- and 15-year-old girls as sexually active.75 Novels such as The Heavenly Twins, published a few years after Stead’s Pall Mall exposé, incorporated commentary not only on men’s moral iniquities, but also on the effects of venereal disease on girls, stressing that the danger threatened the marriageable daughters of society and not just the working-class streetwalker. Romance texts, like New Woman fictions, demonstrate anger at the 74 Elisabeth Jay in Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself ’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) notes Oliphant’s recognition in the 1890s that ‘the code of self-sacrifice she had so long preached simply did not speak to a younger generation’, and examines her ensuing justification of female rebellion (119). In Margaret Oliphant: A Critical Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986) Merryn Williams suggests that Oliphant was irritated by The Daisy Chain since Phoebe Junior centres on a motherless family, also called the Mays, who are not ‘a set of prigs like those people’ (85). 75 Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), ch. 5. For further discussion on Stead’s articles see Deborah Gorham, ‘The “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late-Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1976), 353–79, and Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (London: Virago, 1992), chs. 3 and 4.

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inadequate, even deceitful treatment of young women, and some also (more contentiously) reveal a desire to legitimize girls’ emergent sensuality. Novels locate fault with men and men only: the narrative of male sexual wrongdoing, latent within earlier romances, becomes absolutely explicit. Romance novels’ attempts to incorporate their anger, their horrified consciousness of the damage wreaked by enforced ignorance, into a broadly conservative ideology became increasingly fraught. Writers’ apparent inability to reinforce traditional conceptions of a woman’s highest duty in a time of feminist ‘threat’ is indeed profoundly significant: on the most obvious level, it indicates the depth of discomfort individual writers felt—their increasing lack of conviction in the ideologies they wanted to support. Perhaps even more importantly, it points the way to the imminent disabling of these ideologies. For, as we have seen throughout this book, women were substantially responsible for transmitting traditionalist conceptions of femininity to the next generation—through maternal counsels, both oral and textual. When even conservative women became unwilling to perform this task, to perpetuate notions of marriage as a woman’s pre-eminent duty, the social and cultural mechanism for the perpetuation of the gender status quo was surely operating on borrowed time. Yet while romance novelists seem unwilling to mouth the lessons of the past, they are equally unable to authorize a different set of ambitions for their sympathetic, ‘feminine’ heroines. Having awoken girl-heroines to knowledge and consciousness, conservative writers seem to ponder—what next? The novels examined in this chapter therefore carry many of this book’s themes through (ironically enough, for a study of transition) to a point of impasse. For more than a generation, writers had, through representations of the girl’s transitional phase, argued that education, travel, employment, and public action were all consistent with the feminine ideal. But girls must grow into women, and there’s the rub: most writers remained unwilling explicitly to attack the separation of the spheres, clearly convinced that the private sphere constituted women’s one arena of moral and spiritual authority. Authors consequently faltered at the point of representing a self-supporting adult woman—the logical extension of the well-educated, independent-minded girl. Yet as marriage began to look less and less attractive, the disconnect between girlhood and womanhood became fraught with political, emotional,

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and also practical difficulties; for why would a sympathetic, virtuous, knowledgeable heroine unite herself to a man with a potentially chequered sexual past? In the concluding section, I shall discuss Henry James’s tacit response to this impasse in his 1899 novel, The Awkward Age. The texts discussed here, meanwhile, have demonstrated that the strain of pessimistic romance writing—including, notably enough, Oliphant’s late work—is closely related to New Woman writing at the fin de siècle. Both are occupied by the same questions of sexual ignorance, male sexual incontinence, and the traumatic impact of this knowledge on the unprepared and ignorant girl. However, most New Woman fictions display one crucial difference: a saving sense of optimism in the future, a commitment to women’s potential to achieve meaningful maturity in a world of gender equality. In The Heavenly Twins, Lord Groome warns Evadne to stay away from Mrs Malcomson: ‘“You must not allow yourself to be bitten by her revolutionary ideas. She is a dangerous person,” he contends. Evadne, smilingly, corrects him: “Not ‘revo’—but “evolutionary”’ (Twins, 230). Evadne’s characterization of Mrs Malcomson may just as easily be used to describe the literary vehicles New Women used to express their political and ideological perspectives—for their novels owe much to an evolving tradition of women’s popular fictions. New Women novelists such as Caird, Grand, and Egerton have emerged in this book as the beneficiaries of, as well as the heiresses to, a tradition of romance writing from the second half of the century. New Woman writers used and exploited the possibilities of a female awakening consciousness; authors represented the familiar experiences of the romance heroine—discovering ‘natural’ desires, feelings of restlessness and yearning succeeded by discontent and frustration—in polemical terms. In short, the New Woman author and the romance writer may both now be resituated within a broader Victorian female tradition, a vibrant literary community, a strong history of dialogue and debate. The New Woman herself stands revealed as daughter to a host of rebellious, transitional heroines from the literature of the later nineteenth century.

6

‘A scant but quite ponderable germ’ Girls’ Growth in Henry James’s The Awkward Age introduction In the New York preface to The Awkward Age, Henry James described the genesis of his plot and its development with apparent embarrassment. ‘I must first make a brave face’, he declares, and present ‘my scant but quite ponderable germ’ (AA, p. xxx). The idea of a story about a young girl caught between the schoolroom and the altar and exposed, in the meantime, to her mother’s worldly ‘talk’ came to him (we are told) during visits to the homes of London society matrons in the 1890s: The seed sprouted in that vast nursery of sharp appeals and concrete images which calls itself, for blest convenience, London; it fell even into the order of the minor ‘social phenomena’ with which, as fruit for the observer, that mightiest of the trees of suggestion bristles. It was not, no doubt, a fine purple peach, but it might pass for a round ripe plum, the note one had inevitably had to take of the difference made in certain friendly houses and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded, often delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront of some vague slip of a daughter. (AA, p. xxx)

His exposition of a girl’s awkward age was not only a ‘little idea’ in and of itself, James suggests, it was also historically and geographically limited; narrowly conceived around the experience of a tiny social circle at the heart of turn-of-the-century London. ‘Half the attraction was in the current actuality of the thing’, the author remarks, resolutely characterizing The Awkward Age as a novel of the moment—even more specifically, as a novel of one family’s experi-

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ence of that moment: ‘The Awkward Age is precisely . . . an account of the manner in which the resented interference with ancient liberties came to be in a particular instance dealt with’ (AA, pp. xxxii, xxxiii). Twentieth-century critics of the novel have tended to take their cue from James: Margaret Walters follows the author in characterizing The Awkward Age as a novel of its time; ‘very much a novel of the nineties’, its ‘action . . . trivial’ and ‘its range deliberately limited’. Dorothea Krook observes that ‘In bulk [The Awkward Age] is small compared, for instance, with The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl; and its theme is correspondingly less ambitious.’ Leon Edel summarizes it as a novel ‘about . . . jeunes filles’, a subject that ‘seems almost “quaint” in our time’—and thus once again the apparently insurmountable distance between us and the world of the Brookenhams is critically inscribed.1 F. R. Leavis observed in The Great Tradition that ‘for the general complete misreading [of The Awkward Age] James possibly bears some responsibility—responsibility other than that of having merely been difficult and subtle’.2 Critics have treated this as a small novel because James told us it was a small novel; a novel about a discrete moment of crisis at a fin de siècle. The problem he presents us with— how to bring up girls, or rather how to manage middle-class London girls’ transition from ignorant children to sentient adults—is conceived in the preface as a kind of bee he had in his bonnet at the time of writing; a millennium bug, if you will, standing as a signifier of a broader anxiety about living in what James referred to as ‘an “epoch of transition”’ (AA, p. xxxiv). Rather as we now look back on our concerns about widespread technological malfunction with embarrassment, so James (it seems) re-viewed ‘Poor Nanda’s little case’ with an uncomfortable sense that it could not outlast its cultural moment (AA, p. xxxvi). Writing the preface from the vantage-point of 1908, James worked to reclaim the novel by gesturing forwards, arguing for its relevance and value by positioning it within a vibrant new literary development. The Awkward Age, he stresses, presciently 1 Margaret Walters, ‘Keeping the Place Tidy for the Young Female Mind: The Awkward Age’, in John Goode (ed.), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London: Methuen, 1972), 190–218; 190, 191, 190; Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 135; Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 478. James is, of course, given to making self-deprecating remarks about his work; it is interesting that he is taken literally when speaking about a young girl’s experience. 2 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 169.

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schematizes the inseparability of form and subject: ‘it helps us ever so happily to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really wrought work of art signally break down’ (AA, p. xlv). However, the novel may also be suggestively reappraised by (as James put it) ‘going behind’; by looking back into the Victorian period rather than forwards to modernism. This has been the object of my book: to reveal the evolution in nineteenth-century literature and culture of what James was to call an ‘interval’, an interim phase between childhood and womanhood. The concept of an awkward age has thereby emerged as no mere bee in James’s bonnet, no anxious projection of a discrete cultural moment and class, but rather as a much-debated, much-contested, and ceaselessly shifting concept at the very heart of Victorian gender debates.

‘an int erval had to be bridged’ James conceptualizes ‘the interval’ between girlhood and womanhood thus: ‘A girl might be married off the day after her irruption, or better still the day before it, to remove her from the sphere of the play of mind; but these were exactly not crudities, and even then, at the worst, an interval had to be bridged’ (AA, p. xxxiii). Read simply, this is the kernel of the ‘little idea’: a problem faced by a Londonbased group of upper-middle-class girls in the 1890s. In fact it identifies a significant problem for Victorian culture writ large; how do you draft girls into ‘adulthood’ when you lack a developed theory of adolescence, or to be more precise, when your culture barely acknowledges the existence of an experimental, developmental phase? In a century that recognized the peculiar needs and demands of its children as never before, what words could be used to describe the fact that girls and boys clearly go through a process of physical and psychological change during their teens?3 James, as we shall see, drew on a long tradition of describing the experience in The Awkward Age: his 1899 narrative centres on themes and concerns that had long lain at the heart of women’s evocations of girlhood. And so his text, which may appear to deal with the limited experience of a 3 Philippe Ariès famously contended that the nineteenth century was the age of childhood; the twentieth century, he suggested, was the era of adolescence. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962), 32.

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tiny social group, can instead be seen as both recognizing and contributing to the cultural emergence of girlhood in the later nineteenth century. Previously (James remarks in the preface) ‘female adolescence’ has ‘hovered and waited’ in a ‘comparative dimness’; the ‘modern daughter’, Mrs Brookenham remarks, ‘has stepped on the stage’ (AA, pp. xxxii, 109). Like so many Victorian women writers, James uses a girl at the awkward age as a kind of cultural probe. Nanda Brookenham is an unsettling observer of the era in which she lives; she brings ‘an ingenuous mind and a pair of limpid searching eyes’ to bear on the social customs and mores of her day (AA, p. xxxii). Partly because of who she is and partly because of what she is, Nanda proceeds to uncover something about the state of modern household life: her entrance into the drawing-room reveals that the domestic sphere is not a homogeneous moral space, a haven contrasting with the bustle and business of the public sphere, but rather a world of ambiguity; a sphere of equivocal ‘talk’. It is, James contends, ‘as far as possible removed even, no doubt, in its appealing “modernity,” from that of supposedly privileged scenes of conversation twenty years ago’; times, it seems, have changed, and not necessarily for the better (AA, p. xxxiii). James’s narrative is centrally preoccupied with evaluating the drama that ensues when a ‘new and innocent, a wholly unacclimatized presence’ is introduced to—and unsettles—the modern sphere of the ‘play of mind’ (AA, pp. xxxi, xxxiii). This literary strategy is hardly new: Nanda follows in the footsteps of a host of girls who, while essentially natural and uncivilized—‘unacclimatized’—are introduced to their contemporary society and find themselves disadvantaged by its insincere rhetoric and shallow values. In the process, narrators point to the hypocritical standards shaping modern social interactions, standards that do not punish immoral behaviour itself but rather a lack of concern for appearances. Nanda falls foul of these standards, just as Marguerite St John and Phemie Keller did before her. Nanda is exposed to ‘talk’ and then mocked for reading French novels; she is encouraged to fend for herself and then rejected by a lover for her ‘inappropriate’ knowledge and her desire for self-sufficiency. The greatest agent of this confusion is her own mother, a woman who—again, like so many mothers examined here—is happy to treat her daughter as an object for display, a spectacle for men’s visual delectation. For all Mrs Brookenham’s insistent celebration of modernity (‘“the modern,”’ she boasts, ‘“has always been my own

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note”’ (AA 109)) she tries to treat Nanda as an old-fashioned daughter, a passive, Galatea-like exhibit, inert and open to manipulation. Brightly, she characterizes Nanda as a puppet, a marionette pulled up and down on invisible strings: ‘“We can manage about Nanda”’, she tells Mr Longdon, an elderly friend and social observer; ‘“you needn’t ever see her. She’s ‘down’ now, but she can go ‘up’ again. We can arrange it at any rate . . .”’ (AA 127).4 The central issue of the day, Mrs Brookenham remarks, is the question of precisely when to exhibit one’s daughter in the social sphere: ‘“the whole question, don’t you know? of bringing girls forward or not. The question of —well, what do you call it?—their exposure. It’s the question, it appears—the question of the future . . .”’ (AA 129). Mrs Brook sees the modern girl as little more than a theatrical character, a creation to be moulded from contemporary materials, thus she describes being a young woman as if it were simply a role to be played: ‘“It is the modern daughter—we’re really “doing” her, the child and I . . .”’ (AA 109). Yet even as Mrs Brookenham is busy designing the ideal modern daughter, Nanda resists becoming the prototype. Thus, for her all independence, she lingers nostalgically and idealistically over the past, tacitly rejecting her mother’s interest in the present, ‘“in my own Time”’. At Mr Longdon’s house in Beccles, the girl falls under the spell of the ‘old’. Indeed, the narrator repeats the adjective four times in a single description of the home: ‘the look of possession had everywhere mixed with it, in the form of old windows and doors, the tone of old red surfaces, the style of old white facings, the age of old high creepers, the long conformation of time’ (AA 225). James displays an almost Forsterian nostalgia for the stability of country houses as set against the encroaching flow of modernity and urbanization, aligning Nanda herself with this perspective: ‘“the charm . . . grows and grows. There are old things everywhere that are too delightful”’ (AA 225). Thus while Nanda is partly a fresh and modern commentator on Victorian ethics—‘“It’s so charming being liked,” she went on, “without being approved”’ (AA 217)—she is also at her happiest in the country, surrounded by symbols of age and history. The weeks spent at Mr Longdon’s house, ‘she made no secret of it’ were ‘the happiest she had yet spent anywhere’ (AA 223). Like the romance heroines who linger in forests, woods, hills, lake-shores and coasts, 4 Nanda is currently in the drawing-room, but Mrs Brook is happy to ship her back to the schoolroom at a moment’s notice.

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Nanda enjoys her time in Beccles partly because it allows her the freedom for self-construction, for uninhibited self-investigation: ‘“[It]’s rather intoxicating to be one’s self—!”’ (AA 216), Nanda tells her mother. Mrs Brookenham, however, can only view her daughter’s new relationship with Mr Longdon in ‘vulgar’ sexual terms. The novel makes it clear that Mrs Brookenham and her coterie seek neither to understand Nanda nor to accommodate her into their world. Vanderbank tells Mr Longdon casually that Nanda is a ‘complication’ and a ‘strain’ in all their lives, once she is ‘“Out of the school-room, where she is now. In her mother’s drawing-room. At her mother’s fireside”’ (AA 17). Longdon is baffled by such expulsion from ‘“the home circle. Where’s the ‘strain’—of her being suffered to be a member of it?”’ (AA 18). The structure of the narrative itself heightens the sense of Nanda’s exclusion from the fireside, developing also our awareness of the conflict between her and the values of the world she inhabits: Nanda is absent until chapter XI, by which time her age and name, her photographed image, her attractiveness, her relationship with her mother, and her history have been weighed, evaluated, and discussed by the other characters. She appears, in other words as a Phemie or a Gertrude; a product to be valued, merchandise to be assessed. Discussing the question of whether Nanda is pretty at all, Van puts it quite straightforwardly: But beauty, in London . . . staring, glaring, obvious, knock-down beauty, as plain as a poster on a wall . . . something that speaks to the crowd and crosses the foot-lights, fetches such a price in the market that the absence of it, for a woman with a girl to marry, inspires endless terrors and constitutes for the wretched pair—to speak of mother and daughter alone—a sort of social bankruptcy. London doesn’t love the latent or the lurking . . . It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. (AA 17)

Beauty increases the value of the product: girls are a social commodity, we realize once more, pawns in a bigger social and economic game. The rapacious French duchess puts it most bluntly: ‘“I’d offer [my niece] to the son of a chimney-sweep if the principal guarantees were there”’ (AA 41). Girls are there to be bought, and to be watched until they are bought. And girl-watching, as we have seen, was a common feature of Victorian novels about the transition to womanhood. Van’s (and Longdon’s, and Mitchy’s) observation of Nanda is anticipated by Knight’s scrutiny of Elfride, by Percy’s examination of Zelma. A

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number of James’s own earlier heroines are also closely observed: Nora in Watch and Ward is surveyed, year after year, by Roger Lawrence, and Daisy Miller is examined by Winterbourne. Male characters often derive sensual pleasure from the process of scrutiny, but they are also invariably motivated by a desire to categorize the girls they watch.5 Knight describes himself as a ‘Person of observation’ as he tries to decide if Elfride is innocent or an actress. Winterbourne similarly attempts to establish if Daisy Miller is naïve or artful: ‘Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State . . . Or was she also a designing, an audacious, in short an expert young person?’ (Daisy Miller, 15).6 Ada Cambridge’s 1882 novel, A Mere Chance, represents a similar conundrum for the hero: ‘“Is she a coquette?” he asked himself over and over again; “or is she charmingly fresh and simple?”’ (A Mere Chance, i. 27–8).7 Fanny Emily Penny’s Percy, who ‘watched [Zelma] closely with an eagerness he was ashamed of,’ expects that watching will enable him to uncover the girl’s underlying nature: His mode of studying was not to tear and rend the delicate flower to pieces, but to watch its growth, and look into its heart as it grew. If he thrust in his prying fingers, and tore away the sensitive petals with ruthless curiosity, he would destroy the flower, or cause it to close against him altogether (C&C i. 107).8

James uses a similar picture of nature forced by man to describe Roger’s desire for the growing Nora: ‘The ground might be gently tickled to receive his own sowing; the petals of the young girl’s nature, playfully forced apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more accessible to his own vertical rays’ (Watch and Ward, 58).9 The last passage is not so much about watching as it is about ‘lovemaking’ (Watch and Ward, 58), but Roger’s observation of Nora is central to the narrative—indeed, it is even highlighted in the title of 5 Jacqueline Rose regards this as a common later nineteenth-century phenomenon: she examines Victorian writing (by writers including George Eliot) that ‘focuses its anxiety on the sexuality of the woman and makes her the privileged object of investigation and control’ in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 113. Rose views the Contagious Diseases Acts as a supreme legal manifestation of this view of women as ‘the immediate and visible cause of social decay’ (112). 6 Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 7 Ada Cambridge, A Mere Chance, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1882). 8 Penny’s extraordinary description of Percy’s examination suggests that the young man has narrowly chosen voyeurism over rape. 9 Henry James, Watch and Ward (1871; Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1997).

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the novel. And, as Mitchy points out in The Awkward Age, the two may be closely related: when Vanderbank remarks that ‘“pursuit,” with me, is over’, Mitchy returns: ‘“Why, you’re at the age . . . of the most exquisite form of it. Observation”’ (AA 82). This equation of observation with pursuit, which implies hunting and tracking, is suggestive: the men’s observation often turns into something more violent and more obviously aggressive. The male response is so urgent and dominating, it seems, because the young girl is profoundly elusive in the literature examined here; not just of the men’s ‘romantic’ attentions but also of their desire to categorize, to limit, to define. In most of the novels discussed in this book, the girl’s youthful position, somewhere between child and woman, is supported and accentuated by some question about her virtue and/or ‘nature’; the girl’s transitional, liminal position reflects and is reflected in her apparently ambiguous character. This notion of the evasive, mobile girl is, of course, fully developed in James’s The Awkward Age, a novel whose characters are deeply concerned with the questions of where Nanda should be, where she should presently go, and, perhaps above all, what she now ‘knows’. The questions surrounding the girl’s social and domestic integration, the ambiguities encircling her present location and her future condition, are fully dramatic, James suggests in the preface: ‘what will happen, who suffer, who not suffer, what turn be determined, what crisis created, what issue found?’ (AA, p. xxxii). A number of the ‘issues’ and ‘crises’ that James presents as central to Nanda’s experience (and suffering) may be traced through a tradition of women’s fiction, as we have seen. But there are differences, of course —differences, above all, in the text’s approach to the very question of knowledge. In the last chapter we saw ambivalence, on the part of romance writers, about girls’ acquisition of knowledge: writers recognized the dangerous consequences of sexual ignorance but were unable to assign full knowledge to their suffering heroines. Nanda Brookenham clearly possesses knowledge: indeed, she is a more or less self-conscious apologist for developments sparked by ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’.10 ‘“Girls understand now. It has got to be 10 Hamlin L. Hill Jr. has discussed James’s possible use of this debate in ‘ “The Revolt of the Daughters”: A Suggested Source’; however, although Hill notes that Harrison’s article on ‘Mothers and Daughters’ and James’s novel both contain comparisons of the French and English modes of training girls, he does not comment on one of the most intriguing textual resonances. Harrison’s Madame des Deux Mondes discusses the changes that occur after the girl’s education: ‘[she learns] how to read a

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faced . . .”’ (AA 229), she warns Vanderbank, picking up on the Revolt’s particular concern with what and how much unmarried girls should know, particularly about sexual transgressions. Nanda is both a girl of her period and something of a New Woman: she possesses that crucial symbol of fin de siècle New Womanhood, her own latchkey, and walks around London unchaperoned. She positions herself, to Van in particular, as a kind of spokeswoman for modern femininity, declining to accept the old sexual double standards and gesturing towards a preference for independence: ‘“We don’t care really what you are”’, she tells him, an expansive statement that astounds him: ‘“Your ‘we’ is absolutely beautiful,” he replies; “It’s charming to hear you speak for the whole lovely lot”’ (AA 229). But then one feature of her modernity, it seems, is her very immersion in what she calls ‘The subject of girls’: she firmly believes that the ‘class’ (Van’s word) as a whole has experienced a deep and lasting transformation. ‘“We’re quite a different thing,” she points out; “I’ve seen some change even in my short life”’ (AA 229, 230). For while James is critical of the ‘so morally well-meant and so intellectually helpless compromise’ of the English system of bringing up girls, a system which inexorably introduces them to ‘“real” talk, to play of mind, to an explicit interest in life, a due demonstration of the interest by persons qualified to feel it’ (AA pp. xxxiv, xxxiii), the ‘French’ system of preserving girls in a state of ignorance is never presented as a viable alternative. The Duchess seeks to shield Aggie from all access to talk: in this she recalls legions of fathers who, like Lee’s Sylvan Holt, sought to preserve their daughters from knowledge of sexual misdemeanours, thereby producing a ‘slate [on which] the figures were yet to be written’ or, as James puts it in The Portrait of A Lady, ‘really a blank page, a pure white surface, successfully kept so’ (AA 159; The Portrait of a Lady, 366).11 James’s fiction stresses the inevitable disasters of such training. The effect of Pansy’s upbringing in a French convent is exposed in a catalogue of negatives: ‘she had neither art, nor guile, nor temper, nor talent’ (Portrait, 366), book, how to throw off the self-consciousness of the school-girl. Everything is new, and while our daughters take in the larger life at every pore, they gradually gather material to form judgments’ (E. B. Harrison, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, Nineteenth Century, 35 (1894), 313–22; 315; my emphasis). Harrison’s unusual image surfaces again when Nanda tells Vanderbank: ‘ “I remember you once telling me that I must take in things at my pores . . . and you were quite right” ’ (AA 228). 11 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; London: Penguin, 1986), hereafter referenced parenthetically as Portrait.

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and the prediction the narrator makes about this ‘blank page’ aptly forecasts the fate of James’s later blank slate, little Aggie: ‘to be so tender was to be touching withal, and she could be felt as an easy victim of fate’ (Portrait, 366). Aggie’s dissolute behaviour after her marriage renders the danger of artificially contrived ignorance concrete and serves to validate James’s ultimate championing of the flawed, complicated Nanda. Throughout the narrative James heavily implies that Aggie is something more than the ‘innocent lamb’ she appears: her image is first seen surrounded by a photograph frame covered in blood-red fur (Nanda’s, by contrast, is surrounded with simple white wood). If Aggie is a lamb, she is one raised for sacrifice, a delicate morsel ‘deliberately prepared for consumption’; she is ‘a peach [grown] on a sheltered wall’ while Nanda is a rough ‘northern savage’ (AA 158, 159). James seems as suspicious of artificial femininity and as sympathetic to the unassimilated ‘savage’ as a Linton or an Edwardes; like Caird, Grand, and Egerton too he indicates the authenticity of a young woman’s instincts and suggests they should be fostered rather than suppressed. ‘Both the girls struck [Longdon] as lambs’, James’s narrator remarks; ‘but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood’ (AA 159). The pinkribboned lamb is not protected from doom and blood but simply unaware of it—and The Awkward Age, like The New Virtue, suggests that unconsciousness of danger will produce catastrophe. And indeed, the ominous prophesies of blood are fulfilled at Tishy Grendon’s, when Petherton and Aggie play-fight over a novel on which Aggie is sitting. The scene swiftly moves from sexual innuendo to physical engagement: when Petherton attempts to pull Aggie off the novel, she remarks there is little one can do ‘“from the moment one has a person’s nails, and almost his teeth, in one’s flesh!”’ (AA 290). The hint of the vampire in this exchange forcibly suggests Petherton’s taste for prey: here, as throughout the novel, Aggie is ‘an easy victim of fate’. The Awkward Age thereby stresses that while a knowledgeable young girl like Nanda may be an uncomfortable creature for society to stomach, she is less unsettling than the innocent girl precipitated into willing sexual agent (literally) overnight. A narrative, then, of compromise? Perhaps; certainly, James

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suggests in the preface that ‘compromise’ is precisely what makes the English system exciting and promising. If the alternatives are excluding girls from the social realm (the French mode) or moderating all conversation to make it acceptable for chaste ears (the American choice), the British ‘muddle’ at least suggests a certain honesty, a prosaic approach to the awkwardness of the dilemma. Nanda’s plight emerges as inevitable in a society that refuses to build ‘fifty different proprieties’ into its handling of the young, that is in fact characteristically unable ‘to fit propriety into a smooth general case which is really all the while bristling and crumbling into fierce particular ones’ (AA, pp. xxxiv, xxxv). To put it another way, James is content to see Nanda developing agency and self-determination during the transition to womanhood because he sees this as a product of a greater social honesty—as the predictable result of an appropriate valuing of ‘manners’ and ‘propriety’ by the members of a society. Of course James is a famously unreliable commentator on his own work, and I would like to suggest that his novel in fact offers more than a mere half-hearted nod to the integrity of the British ‘compromise’. For The Awkward Age seems to me to offer something of a solution to the problem of the ‘strain’, the ‘complication’, of the girl’s inhabitation of the sphere of ‘talk’. The final book of the narrative sees Nanda in what Mrs Brook calls ‘“a room of her own—the sweetest little room in the world”’ (AA 17, 34). It is from here that Nanda holds court to one after another of Mrs Brook’s circle; she, now, is the centre-point of the dramatic action. Writers like Margaret Oliphant ‘seemed to have come to an end of all possibilities’ in the early 1890s: although James’s text is equivocal about the kinds of spaces that should be available to the girl, and although New Woman texts engaged more directly and polemically with the role and condition of women, The Awkward Age prosaically yet presciently offers the awkward girl what Woolf would famously claim for all women in the early twentieth century. Here, perhaps, a young woman may find opportunities for work and comparative liberty, for the space to grow towards a relatively independent adulthood. Watching her increasingly selfdetermining daughter, Mrs Brook is shocked to catch ‘sight of a freedom on her daughter’s part that suddenly loomed larger than any freedom of her own’ (AA 220). Indeed, if a claim is to be made for this novel as finally forward-looking, it is surely significant that the last word of the narrative is ‘tomorrow’.

Conclusion This book has offered a historical account of the role of the transitional girl in later nineteenth-century literature. Focusing on the position of the girl in women’s writing in particular, it has suggested that fictional treatments of girls’ growth helped clear a literary and cultural space for representations of the New Woman’s awakening to disaffected consciousness. The book has also tried to complicate our view of ‘the Victorian novel’ and to recover something of the history of the adolescent’s evolution at the end of the nineteenth/ beginning of the twentieth century, although neither of these important projects has been the major focus of its enquiry. The book’s main ambition has rather been to treat Victorian women’s writing with respect—to consider the novels of once-popular writers worthy of sustained literary criticism. And, as we have seen, the texts have yielded complex yet intelligible narratives about the operations of gender in nineteenth-century England. It is easy to dichotomize conservative and radical approaches to gender in the Victorian period: Victorian gender ideologies can be made to seem so rigid, so humanly enervating, that any efforts by women of the time to reshape, reinterpret, and undermine those ideologies look bravely militant. Yet this book has revealed that, as a matter of historical fact, the construction of femininity and the concept of separate spheres were open to interpretation in even some of the most conservative women’s literature. Many conservative writers were as engaged in contemporary gender politics, in the examination of gender roles, as their more feminist sisters; indeed, this book has revealed how difficult it can be to draw the line between them, precisely because both were engaged in the process of interrogating essentialist conceptions of womanhood. The book has hypothesized that conservative writers’ struggles to reconcile advancements in education and employment with traditional conceptions of femininity were in fact particularly destructive to traditional gender ideologies; their unwillingness to mouth patriarchal lessons disabled the means by which the status quo should be perpetuated. Moreover, while feminist claims to self-determination could be dismissed as the preoccupation of a radical few, representations of the

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awakening to disaffected consciousness as the experience of all girls took women’s dissatisfactions with their lot into the mainstream. This is not to downplay the scale of feminist achievements in the 1890s; as Caird in Whom Nature Leadeth wrote, it is clearly important to remember and celebrate the women who courageously ‘walk[ed] on’ over the ‘prostrate forms’ of those who struggled to hinder change (WNL iii. 9–10). Indeed, many of the romance writers examined here were unable to conceive positive resolutions to the problems they identified. This book does not deny the achievements of fin de siècle feminists then, but rather seeks to remind us that the New Women were not fighting alone and that theirs was not the only mode of progress. The final weeks of writing my doctoral dissertation were spent in the stacks of Oxford’s Bodleian library, checking references. This was the first time I had been able to enter the library’s formidable copyright repository (researchers at Oxford call books through an ordering system, and thus never see the bookshelves). At last I saw the full scale of Oxford’s nineteenth-century collection: before me stretched shelf upon shelf, corridor upon corridor, of gold and green, purple, red, and blue three-decker novels, their pages still uncut. It was a humbling experience at the end of four years’ intensive research. I realized then that, even in the wake of feminist efforts to reclaim writers of the past, only a tiny fraction of this field is read, discussed, and understood. Yet it is surely one of the richest and most eloquent records available to us of how a culture changed its sense— and ours—of what it means to become a woman.

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Index Note: page numbers in bold indicate chapters. Entries for titles are mainly limited to novels, articles in magazines/periodicals and didactic texts.

Abel, Elizabeth 70 n. acting see theatricality Adams, W. H. Davenport 5–6, 23 n., 128, 130, 140 adolescence 2, 170 n. fin de siècle ‘girl of the period’ 169–75 lack of 12–13, 29, 47, 214 as myth 11 permanent lingering in 3, 4, 5, 46, 47–8, 170 psychoanalytic view of see psychology and psychoanalysis see also awkward age; ‘coming out’; girlhood; transitional phase advice manuals see didactic texts Africa 130, 146, 147 age of consent 13 & n., 209 Agnes (Oliphant) 87 n., 89–90 All The Year Round: ‘Children of Mystery’ 134–6, 139, 140 Amabel (Wormeley) 49, 50, 51–2, 53–4, 72, 145 anarchy and erratic behaviour, girlhood equated with 30, 34–5, 39, 41–2, 68, 69 see also rebellion Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett 65 n., 131 Anderson, Nancy Fix 136 n. anger, suppressed 43 Anglo-Indian fiction (1880–94) 22, 150–68 didactic writing 127–33 natural girl, exotic 133, 134–50, 160–1 passages to India/womanhood 150–68 use of term explained 152 n. Ann Veronica (Wells) 181 Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes (Lee) 72–6, 79, 81, 90 n.

antifeminists, antifeminism 170, 175, 189 see also Linton; Oliphant; Yonge anxieties see fears Appleyard, J. A. 85 Ardis, Ann L. 18–19, 134 n., 136 n., 153 n., 182–3 Ariès, Philippe 214 n. Aristotle 30 n. Armstrong, Nancy 28 n. artificiality see theatricality Aryan superiority, belief in 130–1 aspirations to self-determination 6–7 see also travel; university; working women Atalanta 154–5, 177, 181, 183, 187 Auchmuty, Rosemary 176 n. Auerbach, Nina 76 n., 97–8, 115, 117 Aurora Leigh (Browning) 82, 85, 142–3 & n., 161–2 Austen, Jane 10, 30 Mansfield Park 97 Pride and Prejudice and Emma 82 Austin, Caroline: Marie’s Home 101 n. authenticity see ‘natural girls’ Autobiography (Sewell, E. M.) 41 Awakening (Chopin) 85, 172 n. awakenings, fin de siècle 190–211 awkward age 1–24 defined 2–3, 21–4 popular fiction and canonical texts 17–21 problems in defining 3, 214 Victorian girlhood in contemporary criticism 7–16 see also adolescence; chronology; ‘coming out’; girlhood; transitional phase Awkward Age (James) xii, 2, 21, 22, 117, 173 n., 211, 212–22

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Ballhatchet, Kenneth 130 n. Balzac, Honoré de 117 Barbara’s History (Edwards) 82, 90 Barish, Jonas 97, 98 Barr, Pat 130, 150 n. Barrett Browning see Browning Beale, Dorothea 127 Beautiful Miss Barrington (Lee) 96–7, 98–9, 115 n. Beauvoir, Simone de 193 n., 194, 195 Beer, Gillian 17–18 Belloc, Bessie Rayner (née Parks) 31 Beringer, Aimèe Daniell (Mrs Oscar Beringer): New Virtue 198–203, 221 Bertha and Lily (Smith) 27, 30 Beth Book, The (Grand) 38–9, 190, 192, 194–5 Betham-Edwards, Matilda 100, 105 Bridget 102–3, 104, 106 Bildungsroman genre 70–1, 95 binary opposites black/white and sun/shadow 117–20 two girls contrasted 112–13, 115, 117–24, 138–43, 145, 155 biology evolution 65, 211 physical development 1, 13, 194 women’s brains 65 & n. Birch, Dinah 65 n. Bird of Passage (Croker) 147 n. birthdays, significant 101 & n., 179– 80, 193 Blake, Emilia Aylmer: Unruly Spirit 203–6 Blos, Peter 3, 54 n. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie 44 n. Bolt, Christine 131 n. ‘boomerang plot’ 183–4 Booth, Alison 23 n. Booth, Michael T. 98 n. Bouffis, Christina 8–9, 11 n. Bowman, Anne: Common Things of Every-day Life 27 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 21 Eleanor’s Victory 76 Lady Audley’s Secret 71, 76, 77 brains of women 65 & n. Brantlinger, Patrick 131, 133 Brewer, Emma 126 n. Bridget (Betham-Edwards) 102–3, 104, 106 Brontë, Charlotte 32

Professor, The 39 Villette 39, 68, 184, 185 n. see also Jane Eyre Brontë, Emily 28 Wuthering Heights 137 n. Brook and River (Davis, E. L.) 5 Brooke, Emma Frances 146 n. Brooks, Peter 117–18 Broughton, Rhoda 9 Cometh up as a Flower 88–9, 90 n., 92, 111 Brown, Lyn Mikel 7 Browne, Phillis (Sarah Sharp Hamer) 127, 141 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 163 Aurora Leigh 82, 85, 142–3 & n., 161–2 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress 44 Burstyn, Joan N. 65 n. Burton, Antoinette 152 n. Butler, Josephine 167 n. Butler, Judith 98 n. Buxton, Bertha H. 17, 100 Nell, On and Off the Stage 101–2, 103–4, 105, 106–7, 108–9 Caird, Alice Mona (G. Noel Hatton) 21, 86, 211, 221 Daughters of Danaus 146 n., 154, 181 see also Whom Nature Leadeth Cambridge, Ada: Mere Chance 218 Cameron, Emily: Daughter’s Heart 101 n. Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope) 63, 185 n. canonical texts and popular fiction 17–21 Carey, Rosa Nouchette 23 n., 178, 187 Mary St John 101 n., 179–80, 183, 184–6, 194, 215 Carleton Grange (Harwood) 73, 74–6, 81 Carmilla (Le Fanu) 201 Carroll, Lewis 10 Caste and Creed (Penny) 157, 158–64, 218 Castle, Terry 115 & n. Caulfield, Sophia F. A. 156–7, 166 Etiquette for All Classes 187 n. changeling/foundling theme 146–7 ‘Chat with Girl of the Period’ (Girl’s Own Paper) 66 n., 176 n., 180 & n., 186 n.

Index Chaudhuri, Nupur 129 childhood child-wife concept see David Copperfield lingering in 5, 14, 42, 51–2, 55 little girls 11 n. see also dependence in adulthood ‘Children of Mystery’ (All the Year Round) 134–6, 139, 140 Chodorow, Nancy 15–16, 26 n. Chopin, Kate 145 Awakening 85, 172 n. Emancipation: A Life Fable 197 Christian Remembrancer 67, 84 ‘Rights of Women’ 30–1 Christianity doctrine, maternal counsels as 36–7 missionary work 129, 156–7 and navigating transition to womanhood 26–7, 36–7, 40, 42, 43–5 chronology 1850s see navigating transition 1860s see turn of life concept 1870s see theatricality 1880–94 see ‘coming out’, theme in fiction after 1894 see fin de siècle class 8 London Society see James working class girlhood 12–13 n., 14 see also middle class Clayton, E(leanor) C(reathorne): Girl’s Destiny 180–2 Clever Woman of Family (Yonge) 4, 46–7, 61–3, 94 clothes see dress Clouston, T. S. 10 n. Cobbe, Frances Power 63, 64 n., 66 n. coincidences, implausible 74 Coleridge, Christabel: Amethyst 1 & n. Collins, Wilkie No Name 72 Woman in White 71 Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter (Thynne) 72, 74, 78, 92 Cometh up as a Flower (Broughton) 88–9, 90 n., 92, 111 ‘coming out’ 6, 13, 127 fin de siècle 186 n., 196 as journey to India 150–68 and navigating transition to womanhood 37, 60

245

and theatricality in 1870s 96, 97 n. theme in fiction 1880–94 126–84 Coming Out (Molesworth) 177 Coming Thro’ the Rye (Mathers) 116 commodification of women 86–7, 88–9, 92, 93 beauty 217 Common Things (Bowman) 27 conduct manuals see didactic texts Contagious Diseases Act 93, 218 n. contemporary criticism, Victorian girlhood in 7–16 Cooke, E. T. 100 n. Corkran, Alice: ‘Chat with Girl of Period’ 66 n., 176 n., 180, 186 n. Countess’s Cross (Egerton) 85–6, 87–9, 90, 91, 145, 195–6 Crackanthorpe, Mrs B(lanche) A(lethea): ‘Revolt of the Daughters’ 172, 173–4, 196 Craik, Dinah Mulock 32, 40 n., 47–8 ‘In Her Teens’ 40, 67, 81 on Mill on the Floss 83 Olive 39–40, 45, 60 n. Croker, Bithia Mary 17 Bird of Passage 147 n. Diana Barrington 101 n., 180 Pretty Miss Neville 154–5, 157–8, 165, 166 Proper Pride 153 Cudlip, Mrs Pender see Thomas, Annie Cuffe, Lady Kathleen 17 n. Cunningham, Gail 134 n. Daisy Chain (Yonge) 4, 34–6, 37, 188, 208–9 Daisy Miller (James) 218 Dalsimer, Katherine 10, 39 n., 40 n. danger 33–4, 52 of disguise 77–8 of freedom 190 n. of harm to reproductive system 132, 179 n., 203–4 of idleness 103 metamorphic potential 96–7 of New Woman 172 of reading romantic fiction 199–200 of university education 203–4 see also motherlessness Daniel Deronda (Eliot) 100 Daughters of Danaus (Caird) 146 n., 154, 181 Daughter’s Heart (Cameron) 101 n.

246

Index

‘Daughters and Mothers’ (Haweis) 182 David Copperfield (Dickens) 47, 48, 49, 75 Davidoff, Leonore 89 Davis, Ellen Louisa: Brook and River 5 Davis, Tracy C. 98 n., 105 n. Day, Mrs: From Birth to Bridal 101 n. day-dreaming see fantasies and dreams D’Cruze, Shani 63 n. death as end of romance of life 82–3 faked 71 marriage as 87–8 ‘début/débutante’ 101 & n. see also ‘coming out’ deception 98 dependence in adulthood 3, 7, 23, 27, 41, 42–3, 44 & n., 46, 47–8, 61–2, 64, 66, 78, 109, 145, 149–50, 166, 170, 185 dependency, lingering see dependence in adulthood Diana Barrington (Croker) 101 n., 180 Dickens, Charles 17 David Copperfield 47, 48, 49, 75 Dombey and Son 89 didactic texts 5, 9, 14, 63, 183 and motherlessness in 1850s 27–8, 31–2, 33–47 mother’s role in 25–7 see also Craik; Sewell, Elizabeth; Yonge Disciplines of Virtue (Vallone) 10, 12 n. disguise and secrecy in sensation novels 71, 72, 75–8 disorder see misrule Diver, Maud 150 n. Dombey and Son (Dickens) 89 domestic life 132 education for 62, 65–7 frustrating, pointless 14, 127, 180–1, 191 ignorance of 58, 59 naturalness 131–2 needlework, futile 141, 181 not enough 58 self-sacrifice and submission 61–2 travellers leave ‘home daughter’ behind 129 see also dependence in adulthood; heroism of domestic life; mothers Doudney, Sarah: Stories of Girlhood 5 Douvan, Elizabeth 7 n.

Dowie, Muriel Ménie: Gallia 174, 195, 204 dreaming see fantasies and dreams dress codes 63 theatrical/performative 67–8, 96, 108, 111, 116 of transgressive woman 76–7 Drewry, Edith Stewart 100 Only an Actress 107 n., 108, 109 n. Drotner, Kirsten 176 n. Drummond, Rev. Robert B. 99 n. dualism see binary opposites Duncan, Sara Jeanette 181 Dunne, Mary Chavelita see Egerton, Mrs George Dyhouse, Carol 3–4, 9, 12, 62, 63 n., 170 n., 173, 179 n. East Lynne (Wood, E.) 71, 76 Edel, Leon 213 Eden, Garden of 51, 60, 84 n., 133–4, 143–4 departure from 52 plot, use of in women’s fiction 60, 84 n., 133, 143–4 possibility of return to 165 & n. see also ‘natural girls’; nature Edmonds, Jill 108 n. education and training of women 31, 69 acting 100 further see university inadequate 62–3 for marriage and motherhood 62, 65–7 Schools Inquiry Commission 62 Edward(e)s, Annie 221 Girton Girl 136 n., 138–41, 143, 145, 149 Morals of Mayfair 49, 50, 52–3, 57, 84, 97, 204 Susan Fielding 77, 94–5 Edwards, Amelia B.: Barbara’s History 82 & n., 90 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne) 21, 198, 211, 221 Keynotes 146 n. Virgin Soil 205, 206–7, 208 Egerton, Mrs 85–6, 87–9, 90, 91, 145, 196–7 Countess’s Cross 85–6, 87–9, 90, 91, 145, 195–6

Index Eleanor’s Victory (Braddon) 76 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 155 Daniel Deronda 100 Middlemarch 38, 83, 184 Mill on the Floss 19, 36, 82–3, 84, 92, 137 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 62, 68 emancipation see freedom Emancipation: A Life Fable (Chopin) 197 Emma (Austen) 82 emotions/emotionalism 6, 87, 171 empire see imperial discourse English Girls (Reaney, I.) 126, 127–8 epiphanic discoveries 90, 144 & n., 161–3 Erikson, Erik H. 70 n., 75–6 n. erratic behaviour see anarchy escape see freedom esprit de corps 187–8 etiquette 187 n. Evans, Mary Ann see Eliot, George Everett Green see Green evolution 65, 211 Ewing, Juliana Horatia 1, 2 exhibition see ‘coming out’; theatricality exotic and exoticism 165 see also Anglo-Indian fiction Experience of Life (Sewell, E. M.) 33–4, 38–9, 45 fairy tales rewritten see sensational romance texts fantasies and dreams 8, 14–15, 80–1, 85–6 Farningham, Marianne (Mary Anne Hearne): Girlhood 63–4 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett 183 fears and anxieties of adulthood 53 see also danger Female Adolescence (Dalsimer) 10, 39 n., 40 n. feminists and feminism 21, 41, 70, 124, 152 n. battles against marriage 191 fin de siècle 175, 178–9, 191 and gender formation 15, 17–19 literary criticism 18–21 psychology/psychoanalysis 14–15, 175 and turn of life concept in 1860s 70 see also antifeminists; gynocriticism; New Woman

247

fin de siècle 22, 86, 169–211 adolescence and ‘girl of the period’ 169–75 anticipated 110 awakenings 190–211 magazines and periodicals 176–90 romance novels 174–5, 179–88 see also Anglo-Indian fiction; James Flint, Kate 26, 28 n., 65 n., 170 n., 171 n., 199 n. flower imagery 52–3 Forster, E. M.: Passage to India 165 Foster, Sheila 28 n., 61 n. foundling/changeling theme 71, 72–6 Fox, Vivian C. 30 n. France 219–20 n., 222 see also southern Europe franchise and politics, women’s 64–5, 69, 131, 175 freedom 197 dangerous 190 n. in India 154 in marriage 42 need for 104–5 see also travel; university; working women Freud, Anna 171 Freud, Sigmund 10, 15, 80 n. friends, passionate love between 39–40 From Birth to Bridal (Day) 101 n. fulfilment, need for 104 Galatea/Pygmalion myth 105, 107 Garden of Eden see Eden Gardiner, Judith Kegan 16, 70 Gaskell, Elizabeth North and South 51 n., 82 Ruth 34, 35–6, 42, 48, 49, 50, 203 Wives and Daughters 51, 82 Gell, Edith Lyttelton: Squandered Girlhood 169–70 gender formation 15, 17–19 ideologies of 191 role reversals 108, 111, 116 see also men Gilbert, Sandra M. 19 n., 143 n. Gilligan, Carol 7, 14, 15 Gilmour, Robin 130 gipsies 134–5, 137–8, 139, 146, 148 conceptual relationship to southern Europeans and Indians 135–6, 139–41

248

Index

‘girl of the period’ concept ‘Chat with Girl of the Period’ (Corkran) 66 n., 176 n., 180, 186 n. fin de siècle 169–75 ‘Girl of the Period’ (Linton) 67–8, 78 n., 88, 111, 176–7, 181 Girl of the Period Miscellany 69 girlhood changes in conceptions of 2–3, 67, 110, 125, 127, 129, 150, 170, 172, 173–7, 186–9, 219–20 definitions of 4, 9–10, 12–14, 135, 169–70, 177 see also adolescence; awkward age; ‘coming out’; transitional phase Girl’s Destiny (Clayton) 180–2 Girl’s Friend 187 Girl’s Own Paper 23 fin de siècle 177, 179, 181, 186–7 ‘Chat with Girl of the Period’ (Corkran) 66 n., 176 n., 180 & n., 186 n. ‘Girls of Today’ 189, 191 ‘Girls of the World’ 126 n. mothers and daughters 173 Social Events in a Girl’s Life (La Petite) 187 n. theatricality in 1870s 127, 129, 154, 156 Girl’s Realm 66 n., 155, 177, 180, 186 n. Girls and their Ways (Reaney, I.) 126, 134 ‘Girls of Today’ (Girl’s Own Paper) 189, 191 Girton Girl (Edward(e)s) 136 n., 138–41, 143, 145, 149 Gore, Mrs (Catherine Grace Frances) 53 Progress and Prejudice 101 n., 193 Gorham, Deborah 62, 171 n., 179 n., 209 n. governesses 172 n. Grand, Sarah (McFall, Frances) 21, 86, 145, 198, 201, 221 Beth Book, The 38–9, 190, 192, 194–5 Heavenly Twins 86, 154, 192, 196–7, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211 Great Tradition (Leavis) 213 ‘Great Unrepresented’ (Oliphant) 78–9 Green, Evelyn Everett: Difficult Daughter 146–8, 190 n. Greg, W. R. 46 n., 56 n., 65 n., 68

Grey, Mrs (Elizabeth Caroline) Duncan: Passages in Life of Fast Young Lady 76–7, 95 Gubar, Susan 19 n. gynocriticism 18–19 Hager, Kelly 28–9 Half-Sisters (Jewsbury) 98, 109 Hall, G. Stanley 2, 10, 33, 169, 170–2 Hamer, Sarah Sharp see Browne, Phillis Hardy, Thomas 17 Jude the Obscure 124 Pair of Blue Eyes 119–24 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 124, 198, 201, 203 Harrison, E(thel) B(erta): Mothers and Daughters 172, 219–20 n. Harwood, Isabella Neil 17 Carleton Grange 73, 74–6, 81 Hatton, G. Noel see Caird, Alice Mona Haweis, M(ary) E(liza): ‘Daughters and Mothers’ 182 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 56 hazards see danger Hearne, Mary Anne see Farningham, Marianne Heavenly Twins (Grand) 86, 154, 192, 196–7, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211 Helsinger, Elizabeth K. 68 n. heroism of domestic life 126 Hester (Oliphant) 6 Hidden Seed (Leslie) 101 n. Hill, Hamlin L., Jr: ‘Revolt of the Daughters’ 173 n., 219–20 n. Hirsch, Marianne 70 n. Holcombe, Lee 64 n. Holt, Ardern: Etiquette for Ladies and Girls 187 n. Homans, Margaret 16 Houseful of Girls (Tytler) 187–9 hoydens, ‘hoydenishness’ 155, 177 Hughes, Winifred 72 n. ideal mother, dream of 54 as role model 26–7, 34, 43, 46 n. ideal world, stage as 99 idealized heroine see romantic fiction ideals of girlhood revised 186–7 identity adulthood achieved by rejecting marriage 83, 90, 91, 94 confusion 74, 111 (in 1860s fiction, resolved 79–80)

Index crisis/loss 75–6 n. disguised/confused 71, 74–7 formation 53–4, 192–3, 200, 204 identification with mother 15, 26–8, 31–3, 35, 43, 55, 64, 207 marriage as conferring adulthood 6, 82 quest for 70 & n., 72, 79 uncertain in 1860s fiction 72–9 and vocational choice 63 see also mysticism ideologies of gender 191 idleness, danger of 103 ignorance and innocence 52 of domestic life 58, 59 feigned innocence 112 of the past 74, 79 poor education 62, 141, 194 of sex 52, 59, 77, 194–8, 201–2, 206–9 of social mores 86–7, 91, 123 see also awakenings; education; ‘natural’ girls illegitimacy 36, 72, 75 imagery 52–3 see also binary opposites imperial discourse, feminization of 151–3 see also Anglo-Indian fiction impersonation see theatricality in 1870s incapacity, adolescence as period of 170 incompetent mothers 27, 35–6, 206 independence 32, 58 see also motherlessness India centrality of 129–30 disenchantment with 165–6, 166–7 Mutiny 130 possibilities of 155–7, 161–2, 165 see also Anglo-Indian fiction individuation 54 n. industrialization 53 see also working class information, lack of see ignorance Into Temptation (Perrin) 153–4, 168, 180 inversion see misrule Italy see southern Europe Ivors (Sewell, E. M.) 37–8, 41–3, 45–6, 94, 97, 110 James, Henry Awkward Age, xii, 2, 21, 22, 117, 173 n., 211, 212–22

249

Daisy Miller 218 Portrait of a Lady 220–1 Watch and Ward 218 Jameson, Anna 29 n. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) 17, 19, 22, 48 blamed for rebellious girls 28, 30 comparison with Dickens 47–8 marriage closes 82 motherless heroine 28, 36, 45 narrative of spiritual growth 44 & n. sexuality in 29 Jay, Elizabeth 209 n. Jersild, Arthur T. 14–15, 80 Jeune, Lady 173 Jewsbury, Geraldine E.: Half-Sisters 98, 109 jingoism 130 journey trope in narratives of growth 41–2, 44 & n., 152 see also ‘coming out’; travel Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 124 Kaplan, Carla: Girl Talk 44 n. Kate’s Ordeal (Leslie) 12 n. Keddie, Henrietta see Tytler, Sarah Keill, Norman 14, 63 Kellogg, J. H.: Ladies’ Guide to Health 195 n. Kempis, Thomas à 36 Kett, Joseph F. 2, 170 n. ‘Kidnapped’ (Kipling) 142, 159 Kincaid, James 94 Kipling, Rudyard: ‘Kidnapped’ 142, 159 knowledge about domestic matters 47–8, 58–9 about sex and marriage 35–6, 48, 58–9, 86–8, 90–1, 94, 194–6, 198, 204, 205–8, 209–10, 219, 220 lack of see ignorance of mother’s past 49, 54–5, 57, 75–6 of ‘the realities of life’ 53–4, 93 see also awakenings; education Krook, Dorothea 213 La Petite: Social Events in Girl’s Life 187 n. lack, girls’ experience of (Freudian concept) 15 Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon) 71, 76, 77 Langland, Elizabeth 70 n.

250

Index

Latimer, Elizabeth Wormeley see Wormeley Le Fanu, J. S.: Carmilla 201 Leavis, F. R. 213 Ledger, Sally 134 n., 173 n. Lee, Holme (Harriett Parr) 17 Annis Warleigh’s Fortunes 72–6, 79, 81, 90 n. Beautiful Miss Barrington 96–7, 98–9, 115 n. Maud Talbot 50 Sylvan Holt’s Daughter 137 n., 166, 174, 196–7, 220 Leland, Charles George 135 n., 139, 140 lesbian potential 15, 39–40 Leslie, Emma Hidden Seed 101 n. Kate’s Ordeal 12 n. That Vulgar Girl 12–13 n. Lewes, G. H. 99–100 Life’s Lessons (Pedersen) 173 ‘liminal’ stages 8–9 Linton, Eliza Lynn 138, 179 n. ‘Girl of the Period’ 67–8, 78 n., 88, 111, 131–3, 181, 221 Rebel of the Family 20, 136–7 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: ‘Maidenhood’ 4–5, 53, 82–3, 177 MacDonald, Susan Peck 32 McFall, Frances see Grand magazines and periodicals 5, 176–90 All The Year Round 134–6, 139, 140 Christian Remembrancer 30–1 Girl’s Friend 187 St Paul’s Magazine 69 Saturday Review 176 Temple Bar 99–100 see also Atalanta; Girl’s Own Paper; Girl’s Realm Maidenhood and Motherhood (Stephenson) 171 Mangum, Teresa 10 n. Mansfield Park (Austen) 97 Margaret and her Bridesmaids (Stretton) 49 Marie’s Home (Austin) 101 n. marriage adult status conferred by 6 anarchy of choosing husband 31 at beginning or middle of novel 83–4, 86, 87, 90–1, 93

‘day after irruption’ 214 as end of adolescence 170 as end of romance of life 82 external aspirations not allowed 7 feminist battles against 191 fin de siècle 170, 185, 191 and franchise 64 freedom in 42 importance of 133, 151–2 Married Women’s Property Act 64 non-communication between mother and daughter about 35 rejected see single life and romance novels in 1860s 70–1, 72, 76, 82–95 self-denial in 44–5 n. sex in, ignorance about 194–8, 206–7, 209 submission to husband 42, 78 woman proposing 114 see also identity; knowledge Marryat, Florence 100 My Sister the Actress 102, 108–10 Marshall, Emma 5 Violet Douglas 90, 204 Marshall, Gail 105, 107 Mary St John (Carey) 101 n., 179–80, 183, 184–6, 194, 215 Maternal Counsels (Pullan) 25–8, 47–8 Mathers, Helen: Coming Thro’ the Rye 116 maturity, maturation 32–3, 37, 41, 50–2, 82, 87, 94 see also adolescence; awkward age; ‘coming out’; girlhood; transitional phase Maud Talbot (Lee) 50 Maudsley, Henry 65 n. Mazer, Cary M. 111, 113 Meade, L. T. 183 Sweet Graduate 189 n. men absent 107–8 adolescence 14, 15, 170 daydreaming 80 n. development as paradigmatic 70 n. focus on see fin de siècle maturity defined 3 women acting as 108, 111, 116 see also marriage Mere Chance (Cambridge) 218 middle age, girlhood viewed from 45 middle class girlhood 12, 14

Index see also awkward age Middlemarch (Eliot) 38, 83, 184 Mill, H. T. 149 n. Mill, John Stuart 64, 65, 149 & n. Mill on the Floss (Eliot) 19, 36, 82–3, 84, 92, 137 Miller, Nancy K. 80 n. Millett, Kate 65 n. misrule, world of 115–20 passim see also transgression mission of women debate 62–4 missionary work 129, 156–7 Mitchell, Sally 72 n., 80 New Girl 4, 7–8, 9, 184, 187 n. mixed race girls 161–2 Molesworth, Mrs (Louisa) 183 Coming Out 177 Morals of Mayfair (Edward(e)s) 49, 50, 52–3, 57, 84, 97, 166, 196–7, 204, 205 morals/morality 126 acting and 111–12 black-and-white 118 inability to resist temptation 103 need for 39 non-participation in acting as virtue 97, 109 selfless virtue 26, 66–7 vulgarity 12–13 n., 68 see also dependence in adulthood; transgression motherlessness plot 31–47 1850s didactic fiction 32–3, 34–7 1850s romance fiction 47–59 fin de siècle 207 see also independence; ‘natural’ girls Mothers and Daughters (Harrison) 172, 219–20 n. mothers and mothering 2, 14 in 1850s 25–33, 58, 59 absent see motherlessness incompetent 27, 35–6, 206 religious doctrine from 36–7 and romantic fiction 47–60 subordination to 5, 14, 26 n., 42, 51–2, 55 as fantasy 75 fin de siècle 205, 289 James’ portrayal of 212, 215–17 revolt of daughters 172, 173–4, 182, 196, 219–20 silence about sex 194–8, 206–7, 209

251

foreign 161–2 as guides 25–7, 34–5, 59 ideal, dream of 54 identification with 15, 64 long-lost transgressive 71 as negative role model 55, 75, 215–16 reproduction of 16, 57, 58, 65, 172–3, 207 and turn of life concept in 1860s 64, 65, 71, 75 training for motherhood 62, 65–7 see also dependence in adulthood; ideal mother; identity; knowledge; motherless plot My Sister the Actress (Marryat) 102, 108–10 mysticism and women’s identity 192–3 name, importance of 75, 76 see also identity naturalness of domestic life 131–2 ‘natural’ girls 49, 51–3, 60, 84, 87, 89, 133, 134–50, 160–3, 204, 216–17 ‘natural’ actor 99, 100, 101–10, 121–2, 125 racialized exoticism (in Anglo-Indian fiction) 133, 134–50, 160–1 see also awakenings; nature nature 60, 84 and awakenings 192–4, 195, 197, 198–9 natural world order 131–2 nature as stifling 103 Romantic love of satirized 103 unreliable 132 navigating transition to womanhood in 1850s 22, 25–60 mothers 25–33 lack of and didactic texts 31–2, 33–47 and romantic fiction 47–60 needlework, futile 141, 181 Nell, On and Off the Stage (Buxton) 101–2, 103–4, 105, 106–7, 108–9 Nelson, Claudia 9 Neubauer, John 170 n. New Girl (Mitchell) 4, 7–8, 9, 184, 187 n. ‘New Imperialism’ 130 New Virtue (Beringer) 198–203, 221 New Woman and fiction 18–19, 21–2, 110, 141–5

252

Index

New Woman and fiction (cont): Anglo-Indian fiction 151–4, 156, 163, 168 see also fin de siècle Nightingale, Florence 32 Nineteenth Century: ‘Reply from the Daughters’ 179 & n., 182 n. No Name (Collins) 72 Nord, Deborah Epstein 135–6, 137 North and South (Gaskell) 51 n., 82 Oliphant, Margaret 9, 65, 67, 84, 111, 211, 222 Agnes 87 n., 89–90 ‘Great Unrepresented’ 78–9 ‘Grievances of Women’ 125 n. Hester 6 on Jane Eyre 28, 29–30 ‘Novels’ 34 & n., 67, 84, 112 Ombra 112–19, 121, 124–5, 174–5, 185 Sorceress 207–9 Olive (Craik) 39–40, 45, 60 n. Ombra (Oliphant) 112–19, 121, 124–5, 174–5, 185 Only an Actress (Drewry) 107 n., 108, 109 n. Only Herself (Thomas) 77–8, 92–3 Ovid 122 n. Pair of Blue Eyes (Hardy) 119–24 pairs see binary opposites Papers for Thoughtful Girls (Tytler) 63 Parr, Harriet see Lee, Holme Parry, Benita 152 n. Passage to India (Forster) 165 passages to India/womanhood 150–68 Passages in Life of Fast Young Lady (Grey) 76–7, 95 pastoral see nature Pedersen, Joyce Senders: Life’s Lessons 173 Penny, Fanny Emily: Caste and Creed 157, 158–64, 218 performance see theatricality Perrin, Alice: Into Temptation 153–4, 168, 180 Phemie Keller (Riddell) 81, 84–5, 86–9, 90–1, 166, 215 physical characteristics and racism 159–60 physical maturation and puberty 1, 10 n., 13, 169 n., 171 n., 194

see also maturity, maturation Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) 44 Pipher, Mary 7 politics see franchise Poovey, Mary 20–1 popular fiction and canonical texts 17–21 population numbers 46 & n., 66 & n. Portrait of a Lady, The (James) 220–1 possession, demonic, acting as 98 Pratt, Anne 52 n. Pretty Miss Neville (Croker) 154–5, 157–8, 165, 166 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 82 Professor, The (Brontë, C.) 39 Progress and Prejudice (Gore) 101 n., 193 Proper Pride (Croker) 153 prostitution 13, 50, 56 n., 68, 98 n., 209 & n. marriage as legalized 55, 89 psychology and psychoanalysis 7, 10–11, 14–16, 175 puberty see physical maturation Pullan, Matilda: Maternal Counsels 25–8, 47–8 Pykett, Lyn 134 n. ‘Queen’s Gardens’ (Ruskin) 65–7 racism see savages concept and racist attitudes Radway, Janice 79–80 Raitt, Suzanne: Vita and Virginia 192–3 Reaney, Mrs G. S.: Waking and Working 101 n. Reaney, Isabel 126, 127–8, 134, 156 Rebel of the Family (Linton) 20, 136–7 rebellion 20, 28, 30, 136–7, 172, 173–4, 182, 196, 219–20 see also anarchy Reform Bill 64 ‘Reply from the Daughters’ 179 & n., 182 n. reproductive system, danger of harm to 132, 179 n., 203–4 ‘Revolt of the Daughters’ (Crackanthorpe) 172, 173–4, 182, 196 ‘Revolt of the Daughters’ (Hill) 173 n., 219–20 n. Reynolds, Kimberley 8, 176 n., 177, 178

Index Rich, Adrienne 15, 16 n., 44 n. Richardson, Dorothy 192 Richardson, Samuel 10 Riddell, Eliza L. (F. G. Trafford): Phemie Keller 81, 84–5, 86–8, 89, 90–1, 166, 215 ‘Rights of Women’ (Christian Remembrancer) 30–1 rites of passage see ‘coming out’; marriage Robinson, Lillian S.: ‘Treason Our Text’ 19, 21 Robson, Catherine 11 n., 13, 209 ‘Roe, Mrs’ 62–3, 65, 67 role models 23 negative 55 single teachers as 173 see also ideal mother; mothers and mothering role reversals, gender 108, 111, 116 romantic fiction/romance novels 133 dangers of reading 199–200 disguise in 76, 77 fin de siècle 174–5, 179–88 and marriage in 1860s 70–1, 72, 76, 82–95 and mothers in 1850s 47–60 Rose, Jacqueline 218 n. Rowbotham, Judith 8, 31 Ruskin, John: ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ 65–7 Ruth (Gaskell) 34, 35–6, 42, 48, 49, 50, 203 Sainsbury, Alison 151–3, 166–7 St Paul’s Magazine 69 Saturday Review 176 savages concept and racist attitudes Aryan superiority 130–1 exotic natural girl 133, 134–50, 158–9, 160–1 physical characteristics 159–60 see also Anglo-Indian fiction; gipsies Savory, Isabel 130 Schools Inquiry Commission 62 Schreiner, Olive: Story of African Farm 153, 178 secrecy see disguise Seeley, J. R. 130 self-abnegation 100, 208–9 see also dependence in adulthood self-absorption 170, 171 self-awareness see identity

253

self-direction in theatrical women’s novels 104–7 self-improvement 154 self-interest and feminism 175 self-knowledge 170 Selwood, Mary 156 sensation novels in 1860s 21, 71, 72 & n., 76–7 sensational romance texts in 1860s concealed uncertain identity 71–81 defined 71, 72 & n. fairy tales rewritten in 73 Sewell, Eleanor L. 41 n. Sewell, Elizabeth Missing 17, 32 Autobiography 41 Experience of Life 33–4, 38–9, 45 Ivors 37–8, 41–3, 45–6, 94, 97, 110 sexuality ‘deviant’ 77 downfall 49 emerging 28–9 fathers unaware of daughters’ 51 fear of 53 ignorance about 52, 59, 194–8, 206–7, 209, 219–21 lesbian potential 15, 39–40 passion valorized as motive for marriage 87, 89–90 pre-marital awareness of 29, 30 n., 36, 90–1, 200–1 rape 202 revulsion towards 154 of same-sex friendships 40 transgressive 56, 78 see also age of consent; knowledge; prostitution Shakespeare, William 110, 140 Twelfth Night 96, 112–13, 114 n., 115 Shanley, Mary Lyndon 64 n. Sheets, Robin Lauterbach 68 n. Shipley, Orby 65 Showalter, Elaine A. 30 n. on lost women novelists 18, 38 n., 72 n., 134 n., 174 n., 197 n. mothers’ non communication 206–7 Shuttleworth, Sally 10 n. Singh, Bhupal 152 n. Singh, Rashna B. 158 n. single life 173 chosen 46 n., 83, 91, 93–4, 95 slang 181

254

Index

Small House at Allington (Trollope) 17, 83, 91–2, 93–4 Smith, Elizabeth Oakes: Bertha and Lily 27, 30 social class see class Sorceress (Oliphant) 207–9 Soulsby, L. H. M.: Stray Thoughts for Girls 1–2, 3, 4 southern Europe 139–40, 141–2, 143 & n., 144–5, 161, 163 conceptual kinship with India 133, 136, 142, 161–3 see also gipsies Spacks, Patricia Meyer 11–12, 19 n., 170 n. Spain see southern Europe sports, participation in 179–80, 187 Squandered Girlhood (Gell) 169–70 stage see theatricality Stead, W. T. 11 n., 13, 199–200, 209 Stedman, Jane W. 108 n. Stephenson, Mrs Robert: Maidenhood and Motherhood 171 Stieg, Margaret F. 151, 152 n. Stoneman, Patsy 28 n., 30 n., 32 n. Stories of Girlhood (Doudney) 5 Story of African Farm (Schreiner) 153, 178 Stretton, Julia; Margaret and her Bridesmaids 49 Stubbs, Patricia 18 Sturm und Drang 4, 136 Stutfield, Hugh E. M. 175 subjugation of wife to husband see marriage Susan Fielding (Edward(e)s) 77, 94–5 Sutherland, John 17 Swan, Annie S. 199, 200 n. ‘sweet girl graduate’ concept 188 see also university education for girls Sweet Girl Graduate (Heade) 189 n. Sylvan Holt’s Daughter see Lee, Holme and navigating transition to womanhood 49, 50–1, 54–7 passim, 59 taming wild girl 146–7 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 71, 72 n. Taylor, Richard H. 119 n. Temple Bar 99–100 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy) 124, 198, 201, 203 That Vulgar Girl (Leslie) 12–13 n.

theatrical women’s novels defined 100–1 impulse to act in 101–10 see also ‘coming out’; dress; misrule; morals/morality; ‘natural’ girls; theatricality in 1870s theatricality in 1870s 22, 96–125 developments 110–25 natural actress 101–10 performative costume 67, 68 Thomas, Annie (Mrs Pender Cudlip): Only Herself 77–8, 92–3 Thompson, Nicola Diane 20, 124 Thomson, Patricia 61 n. Thynne, Lady Charles: Colonel Fortescue’s Daughter 72, 74, 78, 92 Tinkler, Penny 176 n., 177–8, 182 ‘Tomboy’ 177 tradition and past valorized 177 Trafford, F. G. see Riddell, Eliza L. training see education and training transformation see awakenings; theatricality transgression 172 acting as 111 of dress 76–7 of mothers 71 sexual 56, 78 see also morals/morality transitional phase see adolescence; awkward age; ‘coming out’; girlhood; marriage; turn of life travel 128, 129–30, 133, 144–5, 168 fin de siècle 174, 180 & n., 181, 187 passage to India 157, 158 & n., 159, 166 see also Anglo-Indian fiction; ‘coming out’; journey trope in narratives of growth; southern Europe treachery, women’s potential for 98 ‘Treason Our Text’ (Robinson) 19, 21 Trollope, Anthony Can You Forgive Her? 63, 185 n. Small House at Allington 17, 83, 91–2, 93–4 turn of life concept in 1860s 22, 61–95 see also sensational novels in 1860s; sensational romance texts in 1860s twins 112 Tytler, Sarah (Henrietta Keddie) 178 Houseful of Girls 187–9 Papers for Thoughtful Girls 63

Index unassimilated person see ‘natural’ girls university education for girls 62, 128, 133, 138 as danger 203–4 fin de siècle 169, 170, 172–3, 174, 188, 189 n. Unruly Spirit (Blake) 203–6 Vallone, Lynne 9, 11 n. Disciplines of Virtue 10, 12 n. Veeder, William 68 n. Vicinus, Martha 23, 108 n. victimized heroine see romantic fiction Victoria, Queen 23, 114, 129 Villette (Brontë, C.) 39, 68, 184, 185 n. Violet Douglas (Marshall, E.) 90, 204 Virgin Soil (Egerton) 205, 206–7, 208 Vita and Virginia (Raitt) 192–3 Voskuil, Lynn M. 98, 99, 106 Waking and Working (Reaney, Mrs G. S.) 101 n. Walkowitz, Judith R.: City of Dreadful Delight 209 n. Walters, Margaret 213 Ware, Vron 167 n. Warner, Marina: Alone of All Her Sex 29 n. Watch and Ward (James) 218 Watson, Lily 129, 173 wayward girls see anarchy Wells, H. G.: Ann Veronica 181 What Girls Can Do 127 Whom Nature Leadeth (Caird) 153, 178, 224 and Caste and Creed 163

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southern heritage and natural girl 141–5, 148–50, 194 Williams, Merryn 209 n. Wives and Daughters (Gaskell) 51, 82 Woman in White (Collins) 71 womanly instincts concept 194–5, 198 Wood, Ellen (Mrs Henry Wood): East Lynne 71, 76 Wood, Rev James 122 n. Woolf, Virginia 37 & n., 192, 222 Wordsworth, William 11 n. working class girlhood 12–13 n., 14 working women 128, 133 fin de siècle 174, 179 not after marriage 108–9 as pattern characters 61–2 possibility of after marriage 109 n. Wormeley, Mary Elizabeth (Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer): Amabel 49, 50, 51–2, 53–4, 72, 145 Wyett, Jodi L. 11 n. ‘Ximena’ 186 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 51 n. Yonge, Charlotte M. 9, 20, 21, 32, 124, 174 Clever Woman of Family 4, 46–7, 61, 62–3, 94 Daisy Chain 4, 34–6, 37, 94, 188, 208–9, 218 Young, Lola 38 n. Zamel, Vivian 184 n. Zulu War 146, 147