posite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels,
which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is
usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious
baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers
in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle dis
tance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and
her wit are both dazzfing; her nose and her morals are alike free from any
tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she
is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and
reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not
an heiress?that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient;
but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many
matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as
a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips
in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her
reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric;
indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhap
sodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded con
versations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations,
amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks
through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior
instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and
watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side.
4. Repressed, kept down. Eliot's ideas about fiction at the time she was 1. Published anonymously in the Westminster beginning her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rei'ieiv, this review essay, satirizing a number of Rev. Amos Barton.' contemporary novels, provides a good indication of
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SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 134 3
You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps
you in mind that the working-day business of the world is somehow being
carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may
accompany the heroine on her 'starring' expedition through life. They see her
at a ball, and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding
excursion, and they are witched2 by her noble horsemanship; at church, and
they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanour. She is the ideal
woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this, she as often as not
marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots
and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his
heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right
moment. The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious
husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favour to him, to
marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the
lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at
this desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted
heroine pass through many mauvais3 moments, but we have the satisfaction
of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs,
that her fainting form reclines on the very best upholstery, and that whatever
vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having
her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more
blooming and locks more redundant4 than ever. We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious
