Although women wrote novels before Defoe, the father of English
fiction, or Richardson, the founder of the modern novel, we cannot
detect any peculiarly feminine elements in their work, or profitably
consider it apart from the general development of prose.
In the beginning they copied men, and saw through men’s eyes,
because--here and elsewhere--they assumed that men’s dicta and
practice in life and art were their only possible guides and examples.
Women to-day take up every form of fiction attempted by men, because
they assume that their powers are as great, their right to express
themselves equally varied.
But there was a period, covering about a hundred years, during which
women “found themselves” in fiction, and developed the art, along
lines of their own, more or less independently. This century may
conveniently be divided into three periods, which it is the object of
the following pages to analyse:
From the publication of _Evelina_ to the publication of _Sense and
Sensibility_, 1778-1811.
From the publication of _Sense and Sensibility_ to the publication of
_Jane Eyre_, 1811-1847.
From the publication of _Jane Eyre_ to the publication of _Daniel
Deronda_, 1847-1876.
It may be noticed, however, in passing to the establishment of a
feminine school by Fanny Burney, that individual women did pioneer
work; among whom the earliest, and the most important, is “the
ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn” (1640-1689). She is generally believed
to have been the first woman “to earn a livelihood in a profession,
which, hitherto, had been exclusively monopolized by men,”--“she was,
moreover, the first to introduce milk punch into England”! For much of
her work she adopted a masculine pseudonym and, with it, a reckless
licence no doubt essential to success under the Restoration. Yet she
wrote “the first prose story that can be compared with things that
already existed in foreign literatures”; and, allowing for a few
rather outspoken descriptive passages, there is nothing peculiarly
objectionable in her _Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal Slave_.
Making use of her own experience of the West Indies, acquired in
childhood, she invented the “noble savage,” the “natural man,” long
afterwards made fashionable by Rousseau; and boldly contrasted the
ingenuous virtues, and honour, of this splendid heathen with Christian
treachery and avarice. The “great and just character of Oroonoko,”
indeed, would scarcely have satisfied “Revolutionary” ideals of the
primitive; since he was inordinately proud of his birth and his beauty,
and killed his wife from an “artificial” sense of honour. But there is
a naïvely exaggerated simplicity in Mrs. Behn’s narrative; which does
faithfully represent, as she herself expresses it, “an absolute idea of
the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin.” Whence she
declares “it is most evident and plain, that simple nature is the most
harmless, inoffensive, and virtuous mistress. It is she alone, if she
were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions
of man: _religion would here but destroy that tranquility they possess
by ignorance; and laws would but teach them to know offence, of which
now they have no notion_ ... they have a native justice, which knows
no fraud; and they understand no vice, or cunning, but when they are
taught by the white men.”
Our author is quite uncompromising in this matter; and her eulogy of
“fig-leaves” should refute the most cynical: “I have seen a handsome
young Indian, dying for love of a beautiful Indian maid; but all his
courtship was, to fold his arms, pursue her with his eyes, and sighs
were all his language: while she, as if no such lover were present, or
rather as if she desired none such, carefully guarded her eyes from
beholding him; and never approached him, but she looked down with all
the blushing modesty I have seen in the most severe and cautious of our
world.”
The actual story of _Oroonoko_ will hardly move us to-day; and the
final scene, where that Prince and gentleman is seen smoking a pipe
(!) as the horrid Christians “hack off” his limbs one by one, comes
dangerously near the ludicrous. Still we may “hope,” with the modest
authoress, that “the reputation of her pen is considerable enough to
make his glorious name to survive all ages.”
It should finally be remarked that Aphra forestalls one more innovation
of the next century, by introducing slight descriptions of scenery; and
that here, as always, she arrested her readers’ attention by plunging
straight into the story.
Two other professional women of that generation deserve mention: Mrs.
Manley (1672-1724), author of the scurrilous _New Atalantis_, and Mrs.
Heywood (or Haywood) (1693-1756), editor of the _Female Spectator_.
Both were employed by their betters for the secret promotion of vile
libels--the former political, the latter literary; and both wrote
novels of some vigour, but deservedly forgotten: although the latest,
and best, of Mrs. Manley’s were written after _Pamela_, and bear
striking witness to the influence of Richardson.
A few more years bring us to the true birth of the modern novel; when
Sarah Fielding (1710-1768), whose _David Simple_, in an unfortunate
attempt to combine sentiment with the picaresque, revealed some of
her brother’s humour and the decided influence of Richardson. And
though _The Female Quixote_ of Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) has been
pronounced “more absurd than any of the romances which it was designed
to ridicule,” Macaulay himself allows it “great merit, when considered
as a wild satirical harlequinade”; and it remains an early, if not the
first, example of conscious revolt against the artificial tyrannies of
“Romance,” of which the evil influences on the art of fiction were soon
to be triumphantly abolished for ever by a sister-authoress.