A Victorian Album - Paperback

A Victorian Album: Some Lady Novelists of the Period. Lucy Poate Stebbins.PREFACE The long train of inquiries which resulted in this little book began in an idle, summers day discussion concerning the blighting effect of the Victorian moral code on the work of women novelists. This question, when subsequently applied to the lives and writings of a large number of these ladies, brought a wide variety of answers, although at the outset we must in honor confess that most of these authors were revealed as social tyrants rather than as victims of tyranny. Although the charge against the Victorian code could not be clearly proved, much that was unexpected and entertaining emerged, while the purpose of study broadened into an effort to understand the relation between the individual lives and works of representative women writers of fiction. In the case of obscure novelists, source material is to be found only in great libraries to which comparatively few readers have access. Even when ample opportunity is given to the research worker, it is no easy task to sift the truth from varying and frequently untrustworthy reports furnished by partial friends and relatives to the pub lishers of biographical data. To read the work of these women was a labor of many years, so numerous were the scribblers, so prodigious their exertions. But their life stories, enriched by the naive self revelations characteristic of the Victorians, and correlated with their novels, furnished an absorbing psychological adventure. How work grows out of life can never fail to possess an enthralling human interest, and the connection may be traced with some assurance when a novelist and her novels are the subjects pursued by one who in her day has written many novels. It has been convenient to group our authors roughly into classes and to select representatives from each of them; this method has resulted in the omission of several familiar names. Other authors were exempted because their writing of novels was incidental, merely an interruption of a characteristic career: such were the unhappy Letitia Landon, who was a popular poetess; the magnificent Lady Blessington, who was more remarkable as an editor and a hostess than as a fiction writer; and Charlotte M. Yonge, whose favorite field was the juvenile. But though no further warrant is needed for a chapter on obscure novelists of the nineteenth century, an apology may be necessary for the following studies of the four great writers, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant. The pilgrimage of Charlotte Bronte through the visible world has been told often and well; no study of the juvenilia can alter the story of her life as it passed under human eyes. Yet no biographer, however gifted, honest, and sympathetic, has been able to do justice to Charlotte Bronte, because it is impossible to understand her mature works without a thorough study of her youthful writings. With an enthusiasm no doubt pardonable in the explorer but much to be regretted in the scholar recent students of the juvenilia have attributed all the elements in Charlotte's finished novels to her crude early attempts. It has been our more reasonable purpose to show the process by which various fantasies of her childhood and protracted adolescence were purged and refashioned until they could be incorporated in her adult work. . . .