Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists

258 Pages·1996·28.71 MB·English

by  Valerie Sanders (auth.)

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