The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century

The essays which follow consider a mixed bag of women novelists. The phrase is not felicitous, but it is intended to suggest the variety of types and quality of a certain group of late nineteenth-century English novels and novelists. These have in common three very large and loose they are novels with a purpose essentially ethical and didactic; they are novels which for a brief period enjoyed a considerable and sometimes astonishing amount of attention; they were all written by women. The singular anomaly is sex, but the fact that the novelists are women is relatively unimportant. Of far greater significance is the form itself – the late nineteenth-century English novel – so rich, so flexible, and so multi-faceted that it could simultaneously and effectively serve the purposes of art, mass entertainment, public communication, popular education, propaganda, and polemics. This book is an attempt to study the novel of the period not as a work of art, but as a vehicle for the expression and dissemination of ideas. The concentration upon women novelists reflects merely an attempt to narrow the focus and to turn it more emphatically upon the novel’s ethical-didactic functions.