Ch. 2 - The Great Victorian Novelists

The Victorian novel was a thing entirely Victorian; quite unique and
suited to a sort of cosiness in that country and that age. But the novel
itself, though not merely Victorian, is mainly modern. No clear-headed
person wastes his time over definitions, except where he thinks his own
definition would probably be in dispute. I merely say, therefore, that
when I say "novel," I mean a fictitious narrative (almost invariably,
but not necessarily, in prose) of which the essential is that the story
is not told for the sake of its naked pointedness as an anecdote, or for
the sake of the irrelevant landscapes and visions that can be caught up
in it, but for the sake of some study of the difference between human
beings. There are several things that make this mode of art unique. One
of the most conspicuous is that it is the art in which the conquests of
woman are quite beyond controversy. The proposition that Victorian women
have done well in politics and philosophy is not necessarily an untrue
proposition; but it is a partisan proposition. I never heard that many
women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never
heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively
founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. They did, undoubtedly, flock to
Mrs. Eddy; but it will not be unfair to that lady to call her following
a sect, and not altogether unreasonable to say that such insane
exceptions prove the rule. Nor can I at this moment think of a single
modern woman writing on politics or abstract things, whose work is of
undisputed importance; except perhaps Mrs. Sidney Webb, who settles
things by the simple process of ordering about the citizens of a state,
as she might the servants in a kitchen. There has been, at any rate, no
writer on moral or political theory that can be mentioned, without
seeming comic, in the same breath with the great female novelists. But
when we come to the novelists, the women have, on the whole, equality;
and certainly, in some points, superiority. Jane Austen is as strong in
her own way as Scott is in his. But she is, for all practical purposes,
never weak in her own way--and Scott very often is. Charlotte Brontë
dedicated _Jane Eyre_ to the author of _Vanity Fair_. I should hesitate
to say that Charlotte Brontë's is a better book than Thackeray's, but I
think it might well be maintained that it is a better story. All sorts
of inquiring asses (equally ignorant of the old nature of woman and the
new nature of the novel) whispered wisely that George Eliot's novels
were really written by George Lewes. I will cheerfully answer for the
fact that, if they had been written by George Lewes, no one would ever
have read them. Those who have read his book on Robespierre