Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists PDF
Preview Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists
EVE'S RENEGADES Also by Valerie Sanders HARRIET MARTINEAU: Selected Letters (editor) THE PRIVATE LIVES OF VICTORIAN WOMEN: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England REASON OVER PASSION: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel Eve's Renegades Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists Valerie Sanders Senior Lecturer in English University of Buckingham -- Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0-333-66313-4 ISBN 978-1-349-24935-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24935-0 EVE'S RENEGADES Copyright © 1996 by Valerie Sanders Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1996 978-0-333-59563-3 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. IOOIO First published in the United States of America in 1996 ISBN 978-0-312-16057-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sanders, Valerie. Eve's renegades: IVictorian anti-feminist women novelists Valerie Sanders. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-16057-9 I. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature-Great Britain-History-19th century. 3. English fiction-Women authors-History and criticism. 4. Literature and society-Great Britain-History-19th century. 5. Women and literature-Great Britain-History-19th century. 6. Women in literature. 7. Misogyny in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. I. Title. PR878.S45S26 1996 823'.8099287-dc20 96-7156 CIP For my grandmother, Florrie Salinsky, who has seen a century of feminist campaigns and backlashes Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 The Anti-Feminist Woman 1792-1850 10 2 Anti-Feminist Women and Women's Writing 36 3 'Ardour and Submission': Heroines 56 4 'Goody Men and Brutes': Heroes 91 5 'Work that Influences the World': Journalism 126 6 The Anti-Feminist Woman and Religion 160 Conclusion 199 Biographical Appendix 206 Notes 210 Bibliography 225 Index 240 vii Acknowledgements The idea for this book came from a review article by Martha Vicinus in Victorian Studies in 1981, suggesting there was room for a study of the 'enemies of feminism' in the nineteenth century. As it hap pens, the time of writing the book coincided with the so-called anti-feminist backlash of the 1990s, which provided a stimulating background for rethinking the phenomenon. Elisabeth Jay's biogra phy of Mrs Oliphant came out after I had completed my first draft, so I have not responded to it as fully as I should have liked. It is, however, the most comprehensive discussion of Oliphant's novels there is likely to be, and she is to be congratulated on having read so many of them. I can't claim to have been quite so thorough. I am grateful to Margaret Bartley and Charmian Hearne of Macmillan for encouraging this project, and to their anonymous reader who gave excellent advice on tightening the argument. Bruce Collins and Linda Nash read early sections of the book, and my sister-in-law, Susan Sanders, invented the title. Special thanks are due to Anne Miller and Angela Brown for humouring my fear of word-processors and reducing my straggling typescript to a disk three inches square. For permission to quote from the manuscript letters in their col lection thanks are due to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, and the Principal and Chapter of Pusey House, Oxford. viii 'Girls are very different from what they were when I was young,' Mrs Parlby put in meekly. 'Yes, poor things; but didn't you all have a dismal time, playing croquet in tight stays and a hoop, and reading "The Heir of Redcliffe" [sic]?' 'There was a refining influence in our literature when Mrs Olip hant and Anthony Trollope were writing that is sadly wanting now, Mary. And nice young women were really nice,' Mrs Parlby con cluded stiffly. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Miranda (1913)1 'No·woman does think much of her own sex, although few of them confess it as freely as I do.' Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)2 ix Introduction I'm not a feminist, quite the contrary, because it seems to me it's not feminism we need, it's the feminine, it's the woman. All this business of women trying to get high positions as executives is all so irrelevant. It's not what we need, it's the restoration of love in its full sense. These words were spoken by the poet and critic Kathleen Raine in an interview for The Guardian in 1993. Regretting that she had not been a good mother, she added that 'women should love first of all'; she even felt guilty about being a writer and betraying not only her parents and children, but 'women' in general.1 Her words could have been expressed in much the same way a hundred years earlier by Eliza Lynn Linton, but are familiar enough anyway, along with the argument that women can't paint, women can't write; the fre quency with which women begin a sentence, 'I'm not a feminist, but ...' ; or, like Mrs Wilcox in Forster's Howards End, have said, 'I sometimes think that it is wiser to leave action and discussion to men. ... I am only too thankful not to have a vote mysel£.'2 Why have women been so keen to distance themselves from fem inism? This is not a book about political correctness, but the pub licity surrounding the latest 'anti-feminist backlash' has given the controversy fresh energy, and made us think more deeply about the unpopularity of the women's movement, both now and in the past. While Victorian feminism has had considerable attention, less has been said about the other side of the debate: the resistance offered by women themselves to some aspects of their liberation - the vote, increased employment opportunities, easier arrangements for divorce, the availability of birth control, freer dress, or even higher education. Of course, these campaigns encompass a wide range of moral issues, so that an anti-abortionist, for example, may favour women going into politics, but have religious scruples about destroying human embryos. The situation has become more com plex in the twentieth century, with the advancement of science and technology, but even in the nineteenth, it was often difficult for a 1
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