Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

George Eliot opens this essay by identifying silly novels by lady novelists as a genus containing many species, each defined by a predominant quality: the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. The largest class, she argues, is a composite of all four, which she names the "mind-and-millinery" species. Its stock heroine is typically an heiress or peeress (a female member of the nobility) possessed of every conceivable perfection. She is beautiful, impeccably dressed, deeply religious, and intellectually dazzling. She sings with a superb contralto, reads the Bible in its original languages, dances exquisitely, and delivers speeches of such lofty rhetoric that they confound philosophers and reform morally wayward men. A gallery of aristocratic suitors surrounds her, including a vicious baronet (a hereditary titled gentleman ranking below a baron), an amiable duke, and assorted admirers who exist solely as accessories to her "starring expedition through life." The men in these novels serve no independent purpose; they encounter the heroine at various social functions and are invariably dazzled by her brilliance. The plot follows a rigid formula: the heroine often marries the wrong person, suffers from the baronet's schemes, and is rescued by convenient deaths. The baronet dies in a duel, the tedious husband expires in bed while urging his wife to marry the man she truly loves, and the heroine emerges from every trial with a more blooming complexion than before, her sorrows cushioned by embroidered handkerchiefs and the finest upholstery.

Eliot then dismantles a sympathetic assumption she once held: that women turned to novel-writing, like governessing, because they had no other respectable means of earning a living. Observation, however, has overturned this theory. The authors of silly novels clearly write from elegant boudoirs, are indifferent to publishers' accounts, and display no acquaintance with the working classes or any form of life below the landed gentry. They are equally unfaithful in representing both the high society they claim to inhabit and the lower social strata they have never encountered.

To illustrate the absurdities of the mind-and-millinery school, Eliot examines several novels. In Compensation, a novel that calls itself a story of real life, a child of four and a half years old speaks in elaborate prose, comparing a person's forehead to the blue Mediterranean. The child's mother is predictably presented as a genius with "a remarkably original mind" who reads Scripture in the original tongues, while her lover is described as infinitely superior to her in faith and development. Eliot mocks the convention of attributing effortless mastery of Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit to heroines with small heads, while real men struggle to learn even one ancient language. In Laura Gay, the heroine quotes Latin at picnics and delivers long-winded philosophical speeches while visiting the Palatine Hill in Rome, alarming a clerical admirer who suspects her of free-thinking, though she ultimately proves orthodox. Rank and Beauty, a frothier and less religious variant, features a heroine who falls in love with the prime minister through reading newspaper accounts of parliamentary debates, then becomes a baroness and meets him in person. She finds him to be a "living Vandyke" (12), and his "eureka expression of countenance" (13) at Windsor Castle signals the inevitable marriage. The villain, Sir Luttrell Wycherley, is simultaneously a romantic poet, a hardened rake, and a cynical wit who, upon rejection, rolls in the dirt and later disguises himself as a physician in an elaborate revenge plot. Despite its absurdities, Eliot concedes that Rank and Beauty is preferable to the others because its dialogue is more natural and it spares readers the heroine's philosophical pronouncements.

Eliot catalogs the shared stylistic failings of mind-and-millinery novelists: a uniform diction in which lovers have "manly breasts," hearts are "hollow," the sun is a "luminary," and "Albion" and "Scotia" substitute for England and Scotland. Characters speak in archaic, affected language, saying things like "'Tis ever thus, methinks" (16), and the philosophical reflections attached to plot events are pretentious and vacuous.

Eliot next identifies the "oracular" species of silly novel, intended to expound the writer's religious, philosophical, or moral theories. She argues that a superstition exists among certain women writers: a belief that ignorance of science and life qualifies one to pronounce on the most difficult speculative questions. The oracular novelist's ability to describe real people and actual life stands in inverse proportion to her confident pronouncements about God and the invisible world. As a representative example, Eliot provides an extended analysis of The Enigma: A Leaf from the Chronicles of the Wolchorley House, a novel that sets out to solve the problem of evil. She quotes extensively from its incomprehensible prose, in which a model young clergyman is described in sentences so convoluted that their meaning is impenetrable. Mundane details are inflated through elevated periphrasis: a copy of Shakespeare on a table becomes "that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart through the little name, 'Shakespeare'" (22). The plot mixes absurd melodrama with incoherent genre elements, including a mother nearly cursing her son for choosing the portionless Kate over the heiress Grace, a blind Irish harper at a Sunday-school tea, and a forged document detected through improbable means. Eliot compares the novel's jumbled composition to a child's drawing that places a modern villa, fighting knights, and a jungle tiger side by side simply because each seemed attractive in isolation.

Eliot argues that the oracular species actively harms women's intellectual standing by reinforcing the popular prejudice against the serious education of women. Men who encounter an oracular literary woman conclude that women's knowledge remains mere acquisition rather than genuine culture, that such a woman mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality. Eliot counters that men who reach such conclusions do so on superficial evidence, but stresses that many women writers have unconsciously encouraged this opinion. She contrasts the oracular woman with a truly cultured woman, who is simpler and less obtrusive for her knowledge and offers not "the raw material of culture" but "its subtlest essence" (31).

Eliot then turns to the "white neck-cloth" species, which reflects Evangelical religious sensibility. She defines this category as a genteel tract on a large scale, functioning as a substitute for the fashionable novel and aimed at young ladies of the Low Church, the Evangelical wing of Anglicanism. Its stock hero is a young curate, or junior clergyman, who captivates daughters while worldly mothers frown. She examines The Old Grey Church as a representative example, describing it as utterly tame, and argues that Evangelical novelists squander their material by setting stories among titles and carriages rather than among the middle and lower classes, where the real drama of Evangelicalism lies. She asks why they cannot produce works as compelling as Harriet Beecher Stowe's depictions of religious life among enslaved people.

The "modern-antique" species receives brief treatment as the least readable category. These novels attempt to depict the domestic lives of ancient biblical or classical figures. Eliot argues that this form demands the rarest combination of extensive historical knowledge and creative genius. She cites Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion as an example: a feeble love story between a Jewish captive and a Roman vestal, a priestess of Vesta bound to chastity, dressed up with grandiloquent phrases meant to suggest ancient coloring.

Eliot concludes with a broader argument about women's literary capacity and the damage done by indiscriminate praise. She criticizes reviewers who lavish formulaic compliments on every lady novelist and observes a paradoxical pattern: when a woman's talent is at zero, praise is at its highest; when she achieves genuine excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. She cites Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell (the pen name of Charlotte Brontë), and Mrs. Gaskell as women of real talent who received the same critical rigor applied to men, rather than the patronizing over-praise reserved for mediocre women writers. The greatest deficiencies in feminine literature, Eliot contends, stem not only from intellectual shortcomings but from a lack of moral qualities essential to literary work: patient diligence, a sense of responsibility in publication, and respect for the writer's art. She rejects the excuse that society forces women into writing by shutting them out of other occupations, arguing that for every woman who writes from necessity, three write from vanity. The essay ends on an affirmative note: Fiction is a domain in which women can fully equal men, as a cluster of great names proves. Yet fiction's freedom from rigid technical requirements is both its virtue and its fatal temptation for unqualified writers. Eliot closes with the fable of La Fontaine's ass, who touches his nose to a flute, produces a sound, and declares that he too plays the flute, offering this as a cautionary parable for any woman tempted to add to the number of silly novels by lady novelists.