and often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works
are on the way to become classics. No sooner does a woman show that she
has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately
praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when
a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch;
when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and
if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.
Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell6 have been treated as cav
alierly as if they had been men. And every critic who forms a high estimate of
the share women may ultimately take in literature, will, on principle, abstain
from any exceptional indulgence towards the productions of literary women.
For it must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into
feminine literature, that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to the
want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities that con
tribute to literary excellence?patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility
involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer's
art. In the majority of women's books you see that kind of facility which springs
from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination
or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to
barrenness; just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of
4. What they eal! the spirit of the age / is at the women writers of the 19th century; Martineau base the gentlemen's own spirit, /in which the ages (1802?1876), a prolific author in a range of non- are reflected (German; Goethe's Faust I [1808], fiction genres; Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Naclit, lines 577-79). novelist (first published under the pseudonym 5. Women hired to look after mothers and babies Bell); and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), novel- in the first month after childbirth. ist. 6. Eliot names three of the foremost British
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SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS / 1349
tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them
silent. The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being coun
terbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation
implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false
impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman. On this
ground, we believe that the average intellect of women is unfairly represented
by the mass of feminine literature, and that while the few women who write
well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many
women who write ill are very far below it. So that, after all, the severer critics
are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine author
ship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in rec
ommending women of mediocre faculties?as at least a negative service they
can render their sex?to abstain from writing. The standing apology for women who become writers without any special
qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation.
Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for the manufacture of
many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But society,
like 'matter,' and Her Majesty's Government, and other lofty abstractions, has
its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise. Where there is one
woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three women who write
from vanity; and, besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy
fact of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of femi
nine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances.
'In all labour there is profit;'7 but ladies' silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labour than of busy idleness. Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;? novels, too, that have a
