VICTORIAN WOMEN NOVELISTS:

A very significant section of the Victorian novelists consisted of the woman novelists. The women
novelists of the age were the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot.

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) admired Thackeray and Trollope. Her own novels may lack the
cultivated urbanity of Vanity Fair and the experimental role-playing of Thackeray’s personae, but they
are in no sense unsophisticated. Despite the intense privacy and relative seclusion of the Yorkshire
parsonage from which her novels emerged; Charlotte Bronte shared with her sisters Emily Bronte
(1818-48) and Anne (1820-49) a particularly informed, if somewhat detached, view of the wider world.
As children, the three sisters had immersed themselves in the ideological debates publicized in the
great journals of their time and in the late flickering of European Romanticism. Their first collaborative
fictions, the elaborate narratives concerned with the fantasy kingdoms of Angria and Gondal, are
adaptations on and variations on, oriental and Gothic extravaganzas heightened by modern political
realities and personalities.

The eldest Bronte sister Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, a first person autobiography which shows
the sufferings of an orphan heroine. Charlotte Bronte wrote under the pen name of Curer Bell. She
created her own fictional world, where emotions were underplayed, passions were not exhibited. Jane
Eyre is the story of the love between Jane and Rochester, the wealthy gentleman, at whose residence,
Jane works as a governess. They are about to marry when Jane learns about the existence of
Rochester’s already existing wife, the mad woman, locked up in the attic and she leaves the house. In
the meantime, the woman locked up sets fire to the house and dies and Rochester is blinded. Jane
having come into some fortune returns to Rochester to take care of him and marry him with a clean
conscience.

Charlotte Bronte’s other novels areThe Professor published posthumously in 1857 though written in
1846; and Shirley (1849). Shirley was ‘a condition of England’ novel which offered a bold retrospect
on the Luddite agitation and machine breaking that had characterized the politics of the industrial
North in the early 1810s. The main interest of the story derives from its particularly distinct female
characters, most notably that of Shirley Keeldar. Some of the local and thematic material of The
Professor; strikingly reshaped into a far finer novel, Villette. (1853). Villette may be touching on the
topics of the day in a limited political sense, but it deals directly and often painfully with the pressing
issues of women’s choice and women’s employment. The novel’s narrator Lucy Snowe , is an
autobiographer, denied the scope, the certainties and the happy personal resolution of Jane Eyre. She
is priggish and frosty where Jane Eyre was bold and fiery. Her English Protestant isolation and indeed
alienation, is stressed by her novel’s unlovely, urban Belgian setting, by its frequent recourse to French
dialogue and terminology, and by its variously intrusive, inquisitive, flirtatious and restrictive Catholic
characters.

Anne Bronte: Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey was co-published with her sister Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights in 1847. Agnes Grey has remained firmly in the shadow of the work of Charlotte and Emily
Bronte. Its governess-narrator endures loss of status, humiliation, snobbery and insult; but her
account of herself is characterized by a calm sense of her own moral justification. IT presents a picture
of the restrictions on contemporary middle class women seeking the only respectable form of paid
employment. Anne Bronte’s second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) describes the
events surrounding a drastically unhappy marriage and the escape from that marriage by its heroine.
Helen Graham.

Emily Bronte: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is the story of two families and an outsider. The two
families are the Earnshaw family and the Linton family. The outsider is Heathcliff, an orphan boy. The
Earnshaw family resides at Wuthering Heights. The Linton family lives at Thrushcross Grange, about
four miles distant from Wuthering Heights, , down in the valley. The Earnshaw family consists of Mr.
Earnshaw, Hindley and Catherine who are the sons and daughters of Mr. Earnshaw respectively.
Moreover Mr. Earnshaw brings in a dirty, ragged orphaned child from the Liverpool slum, named
Heathcliff who grows up as the outsider in the Earnshaw residence. The Linton family consists of Mr.
And Mrs Linton and two children Edgar and Isabella. It is a saga of three generations narrating through
the mode of a double narrative; the unfulfilled tormented love between Catherine and Heathcliff,
Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton; Heathcliff’s revenge and his use of the children of the third
generation Catherine younger and his son Linton Heathcliff into a forced marriage to gain control over
Thrushcross Grange and his control over Hareton Earnshaw to give him control over Wuthering
Heights; till his revenge is satisfied. The gory death of Heathcliff, the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw all
mark the novel as distinctively Gothic and Byronic Romance.

George Eliot (1819-80) was born Mary Ann Evans, daughter of a steward of a Warwickshire Estate.
Mary Ann Evans read all the sages like Wordsworth, and became one. She thirsted for understanding
and all her life educated herself in ancient and modern literature, religious history, philosophy and
science. At twenty –one she lost the passionate literal belief of the Evangelicalism which had seized
her in childhood. She sought then to reinterpret human life and history by the light of a human
imagination and the human sciences, retaining Christian values of love, sympathy and duty.

The intellectual who had grown up on Walter Scott began to write stories about herself. When Scenes
of Clerical Life appeared in 1857, George Eliot was thought to be a clergyman, or a clergy wife. There
followed Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, The Radical (1866),
Middlemarch (1871-2), Daniel Deronda. AR her death Eliot was admired, even revered. She has been
accounted one of the two or three great 19th century novelists, and Middlemarch the classic Victorian
realist novel. While The Mill on The Floss portrays the tender love between brother and sister Maggi
and Tom Tulliver, Middlemarch depicts the intellectual, educated Victorian lady emerging who
realises the shortcomings of the patriarchal Victorian man and her own qualities as a woman. Daniel
Deronda (1876) is her most truly cosmopolitan work, dealing not simply with a cultivated European
world of artists and musicians but also with the contrast between the sensibilities of a pampered and
limited English aristocracy and those of despised, but intense, Jewish outsiders. At the end of the
novel Gwendolen Harleth may also appear to be a broken river flowing several ways at once, but she
lacks both Romola’s determined purpose and Dorothea’s moral resources.

Elizabeth Gaskell: Gaskell’s works have the virtues of the 19th century realist fiction. Cranford (1853)
set among the ladies of a small town near Manchester, is small, well observed, and genteel. Her most
distinguishing book is Wives and Daughters (1866), Ruth (1853) and North and South. Cranford
(1853), set among the ladies of a small town near Manchester, is small, well-observed, gently
penetrating. Apparently her least serious book, its deserved popularity may diminish idead of her true
merit. Her most distinguished book is the not quite finished Wives and Daughters (1866) which
anticipates George Eliot in its steadily built up exploration of family and provincial life.