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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
Describing the silliness and feminine fatuity of many popular books by lady novelists, George Eliot perfectly skewers the formulaic yet bestselling works that dominated her time, with their loveably flawed heroines.
Essay first published for Westminster Review in 1856.
Essay first published for Westminster Review in 1856.
111 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1856
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About the author
George Eliot
3,111 books4,905 followersMary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
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November 9, 2022
British author George Eliot, 1819 - 1880
Lively, perceptive essay by English author Mary Ann Evans writing under the pen name George Eliot. Here are a batch of direct quotes along with my comments. To extract the full impact and flavor of the author's elegant words of wisdom, I've included a link to her essay at the bottom of my review. I had great fun doing the write up. Hope you enjoy reading.
“The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond.”
Novelists writing novels with the female reader in mind; writing novels with the formula that sells. One clear fruit of these George Eliot era silly novels are the thousands of mass market romance novels with their covers in vivid ruby, mauve, raspberry, rose and coral, usually placed on separate racks in bookstores or libraries.
“Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
The idealized stereotype - the perfect fit for a silly novelist’s main character and a Hollywood movie director’s star. Do these people ever have issues with skin rash or acne or bad teeth?? No! Never happen.
“Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress—that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society.”
Yet again another winning formula that works time after time, right up to our modern day with movies like Maid in Manhattan and Working Girl.
“We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society.”
Nothing close to Charles Dickens’ Hard Times or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; no sweatshops or hours spent working out in the fields under a harsh sun since good looks and a good figure are needed ingredients for a juicy romance - all requiring leisure and freedom, a life undergirded by money, the more the better.
“We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their bread.”
In other words, women back in George Eliot’s day were excluded from the majority of professions within business, science and the arts, therefore, as a fallback or last resort, women wrote novels. Not exactly the formula that makes for outstanding literature.
“It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains.”
Ouch! As one of the greatest English writers and novelists, George Eliot fumes at all aspects of silliness in silly novels.
“It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.”
According to George Eliot, these silly lady novelists are living in La La Land creating cardboard characters so flimsily constructed their writing commits an injustice to all, from the makers of prose and poetry down to the makers of cardboard.
“The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species—novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories.”
Even today, such novels abound – for me, coming immediately to mind: Embrace the Serpent and The Campaign by literary luminary Marilyn Quayle, wife of former Vice President Dan Quayle. Judging from the reviews I read of these two novels, Ms. Quayle has clean, upstanding, wholesome, conservative types representing the forces of good doing battle against those swinish, evildoing liberals.
“Thus, for Evangelical young ladies there are Evangelical love stories, in which the vicissitudes of the tender passion are sanctified by saving views of Regeneration and the Atonement. These novels differ from the oracular ones, as a Low Churchwoman often differs from a High Churchwoman: they are a little less supercilious and a great deal more ignorant, a little less correct in their syntax and a great deal more vulgar.”
The church novels George Elliot notes here are undoubtedly the forerunners of variations on “Christian” literature, that is, novels as the framework for promoting one’s religion.
“Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down.”
Hey, if you lack the talent and technical skills to participate in other arts, things like playing the oboe or performing in a Shakespeare play, no problem, you can always write a novel!
“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 precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience.”
Fortunately this is recognized as true more today than ever – a great novel is a great novel, regardless if written by a woman or man. And many are the women who have written great novels, not only in England but spanning many countries across the globe.
The Essays of George Eliot are available online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28289...
August 5, 2018
Siempre me llama la atención ver a un escritor criticar el trabajo de un compañero, como si se diera por hecho que él está por encima de la media o en la cúspide de los elegidos. Pero en este caso es para taparse los ojos. Entiendo que todos tengamos un criterio sobre X libro o autor, pero este ensayo es "contra las mujeres ociosas que no tienen nada más a hacer que deleitarnos con su recargada prosa" (por favor, entiéndase la ironía) Aun así, y curiosamente, no he podido evitar darme cuenta de que la idea general de las novelas románticas de mediados de 1850 sigue vigente hoy en día. Los mismos arquetipos de heroínas y galanes... ¿Tan poco hemos avanzado?
May 23, 2015
Il manifesto contro i libri di merda, datato 1856.
December 20, 2021
"Every art which had its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery.”
An interesting essay where George Eliot criticizes certain characteristics of novels written by some female authors in the Victorian era, since she considered these stories like silly, and with lack of deepness or meaning.
Despite the fact that I didn't agree on all the topics the author has mentioned in her book, I truly enjoyed reading this one. Besides, during the whole book (especially at the beginning of the essay), Eliot is trying to be so ironic and funny, that I couldn't help but chuckle out loud sometimes.
In a nutshell, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is a short, very well written essay, at which her author expresses her opinion on that topic with a peculiar, but good sense of humor. I definitely recommend it.
By the way, Eliot, I’ll see you again when I decide to pick up Middlemarch next year – I think I might be ready for that journey (or maybe I’m quite ingenuous).
An interesting essay where George Eliot criticizes certain characteristics of novels written by some female authors in the Victorian era, since she considered these stories like silly, and with lack of deepness or meaning.
Despite the fact that I didn't agree on all the topics the author has mentioned in her book, I truly enjoyed reading this one. Besides, during the whole book (especially at the beginning of the essay), Eliot is trying to be so ironic and funny, that I couldn't help but chuckle out loud sometimes.
In a nutshell, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is a short, very well written essay, at which her author expresses her opinion on that topic with a peculiar, but good sense of humor. I definitely recommend it.
By the way, Eliot, I’ll see you again when I decide to pick up Middlemarch next year – I think I might be ready for that journey (or maybe I’m quite ingenuous).
December 20, 2015
I'd loved the title of this essay since I first heard of it in my early teens, yet hadn't read it until now. Its existence must have been one of the reasons - along with the pseudonym - I always felt more of a fan of George Eliot than of Austen or the Brontes (with exceptions for Northanger Abbey and Wildfell Hall).
I've cut down on the number of community reviews I read on GR, and haven't looked at these ones on this page for a while. In general, the title would be controversial these days, because of the strand of [Anglo-American?] feminism which looks at highly feminised aspects of culture and how they have been devalued in some quarters. (This review discussion gives some recent examples in film without going into the politics.) Feminisms are ever contradictory, and the previous coexists alongside efforts to get manufacturers to make children's toys and products less gendered. (I suspect that the latter, as well as obviously being more characteristic of parents, includes women who are older than the predominantly-twentysomethings I see arguing online for the respect of 'girly' culture.) I've put off reading Eliot's essay a few times because I wasn't looking forward to writing a GR review in this tiringly push-me-pull-you context.
Here, in any case, is how I feel personally about this issue. Popular and commercial culture pushes these things very heavily, whether it's pink plastic toys, chicklit and its successors in fiction, or romcom films. In most contexts outside academic and intellectual circles (and even people who inhabit those circles may spend significant proportions of time outside them, e.g. students and artists in bill paying jobs, or anyone among certain relatives or friends) these things are considered 'normal'. They are hard to get away from. There is a bunch of stuff which seems to need defending mostly to specific corners of academia and the literati. If a man doesn't like sports or airport thrillers, he's only weird to the blokey blokes. If you're a woman and you reject romcoms and so forth, and would be happy never to hear any more about them for the rest of your life, you get wrong from both mainstream women and a bunch of feminists. Do the latter really know the purgatorial tedium of life in an office with a load of chicklit readers who subtly expect you to be more like them?
I am not interested in going around defending the essentialist culture which means Francine Pascal, creator of Sweet Valley High, is statistically my most-read author because of an idea I picked up when younger about 'trying to do things properly and normally' and the library had hundreds of her books. Or, earlier made me shy about asking for a Scalextric until after too much money had been spent on My Little Pony buildings and further large toys weren't allowed. Let alone a load of crap ideas about being a woman relative to relationships with men, which I got from magazines, occasional chicklit, and women's forums* - which it took years to realise didn't fit my personality and vague queerness. I know most feminists have a beef with those sources too, but the content of this culture they say is devalued is mostly full of crap and is over-valued in many quarters, and I think it's a terrible rallying point. As for knitting - well, trying that out again, inspired by a related fashion (although I knew I used to hate it) wasn't a good move, but at least I managed to sell most of the kit, and it's not pernicious like the above given its varied images these days.
There is always going to be popular culture. You don't have to like it, or all of it. If you don't, it's nice to have the luxury of an existence where you can ignore it most of the time. Not everyone who'd like to, does. Though some people put themselves in the way of stuff they dislike just so they can rant about it.
I don't know if George Eliot had to read the trashy popular novels of her day; quite possibly given that she made money from book reviewing. [How quaint!]
The title essay is wonderfully sardonic. I'd forgotten she could be funny.
Following a quote from a 'silly novel' in which a four-year old makes a long speech, including Ossianic similes of Scottish Highland scenery:
We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon, who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed by gin, is herself a phoenix.
On a villain:
He is not only a romantic poet, but a hardened rake and cynical wit; yet his deep passion for Lady Umfraville has so impoverished his epigrammatic talent, that he cuts a poor figure in conversation.
Facets of the novels she criticises are recognisable today. (Hm, if I'd never read any chicklit, I wouldn't be able to say this.)
- The 'mind and millinery' subgenre.
Chicklit heroines aren't necessarily advanced to great wealth - much as 'Shopaholic' would like - but those 90s-00s novels often feature characters with, or studying for, higher degrees who never talk as if they're academic; one allusion to a topic will apparently do fine to convince, and the rest of the time the person (male or female) is a bland airhead.
Eliot lambasts and quotes long and improbable philosophical speeches made by heroines of Victorian popular fiction. They are indeed silly. However, at least they show the woman thinks in detail about the subjects she's alleged to.
These very brainy heroines evidently have no novelty in Eliot's time - just as, in the contemporary British fictional world, Oxbridge would award millions of degrees whilst other universities were almost empty. Taking a longer historical view, it seems like significant progress that these women are intelligent and agentic in a way that Samuel Richardson's heroines would barely be able to conceive of. Young female readers of the 1850s were dreaming of being a different sort of person - more modern and less passive than I'd assumed. Titles and money, though, remain essential to their leverage - as middle-class Eliot points out.
Interesting to see 'frothy' used - I'd understood it to be a contemporary entertainment and publishing industry adjective for romcom/chicklit material, not well understood elsewhere. (I'd tried it out a few times.) It's evidently quite old.
- The 'oracular' novels' closest contemporary equivalent may be New Age tinged books like Eat Pray Love. Or perhaps books that assume angels are real. Or 'Christian fiction', which one rarely comes across in the UK without looking specifically - I know little about it, though suspect it's more like the Evangelical novels Eliot also has a go at. The 'oracular' is a more specifically Victorian phenomenon, with characteristic gothic-tinged landscapes alongside a dash of High Church Anglicanism.
Popular historical novels of the day were apparently inclined to the overly grandiloquent an humourless. These days we have other tropes, such as 'the only modern man' and thousands of heroines with contemporary feminist values who somehow grew up hundreds of years ago, with conservative parents. The tendency to write about aristocrats has lessened, though not so much we don't recognise her complaints.
Eliot's principal objection to these authors, though, is ultimately because the status of women still had a long way to go. She is concerned they may hamper advancement, by making it look as if educating a woman produces someone who shows off their learning pompously, inaccurately and at inopportune moments. [Did many men actually read these books, however?] Her summation of the silly lady novelists makes them sound a lot like know-it-all callow teenagers who show off whenever they can, in order to assert their sense of superiority, whilst coming off as naive and embarrassing to those a little older. Perhaps the level of respect, responsibility and access to information commonly given to women at the time made them feel similarly to these teenagers - and only the very strongest personalities and talents, such as Eliot, broke through that, their success also aided to one extent or another by luck and other circumstances.
Already a problem 150 years ago, and infinitely worse now, is another issue she raises: a great many people write bad books and, not knowing how bad they are, have them published. As she says, it's easy for a person to know if they are tone deaf as regards music; less so in writing fiction.
Eliot's writing is infinitely clearer and more readable than the overly ornate quotes from the 'silly novels'. I find the books interesting to hear about, but not to the extent of those people who write theses on them - am grateful for the excerpts.
-----------
This Penguin Great Ideas book also contains five other essays.
[Incidentally, I hope the series eventually contains more than two volumes by women dealing with primary subjects other than feminism.]
Geraldine Jewsbury's Constance Herbert
Review of a largely forgotten novel, about three sisters who decide not to marry so they don't pass on inherited insanity in their family. (I wonder if it was something we now know to be multifactorial, or a disease like Huntington's, where in the absence of testing and contraception this sounds a good decision.) Jewsbury makes all the rejected suitors turn out to be awful. Eliot takes issue with 'the very questionable satisfaction of discovering that objects once cherished were in fact worthless'. I agree that it's good to have something nice to remember if one must give up on some part of life.
Also interesting to see that even Eliot appears to subscribe to the view, perhaps influenced by the rise of science, that there are single ultimate truths waiting to be discerned about a) what men want from women in relationships (so many terrible self-help books talk as if there were) and b) the [then-current] position of women in society.
Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollestonecraft
Am unfamiliar with Fuller; at any rate, Eliot finds many commonalities between the writings of these two early feminists, published 50 years apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic. One could see the essay as, initially, written in drag, in the voice of a moderate chap who thinks things should be improved a little for women, but we shouldn't exaggerate the abilities of the poor dears. However, this belies an argument evidently important to Eliot, used not just later in this essay, but also about black American slaves in the following piece about Harriet Beecher Stowe: if these people are portrayed as such paragons of virtue whilst they are oppressed, is that not dangerously close to arguing that their oppressed state is good for them and for society, and that they may be less virtuous and able if given more freedom? It's not one heard these days, in my experience; any rate it says a lot about Victorian society and is interesting from that viewpoint.
Bits and pieces about how men and women interact in relationships, now considered to be down to personalities and attachment styles, were, it seems, commonly thought to be all - not just partly - about educational level. I found something similar in Frederika Bremer, Eliot's review of whom is also in this collection. It's one of those opinions probably necessary at the time in order to effect social change, and which would eventually be revised.
Having read a little of Wollestonecraft's biography, I would love to know if she was criticising "the clinging affection of ignorance" - as mentioned in a long quote - from a viewpoint of self-awareness.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred, Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late To Mend and Fredrika Bremer's Hertha
Apparently people loved Dred at the time; it's hardly known of now in the UK; not sure about the US. The Reade sounds laughably formulaic - it even features farmers named Fielding and Meadows - though Eliot writes of it as we might of a reasonable but not top-notch bit of contemporary litfic. I used qualifiers 'largely forgotten' and 'hardly known' earlier because I have read Bremer, who's far from famous here now. Eliot writes of the Swede's previous books as a half-forgotten craze of ten years previously. I quite enjoyed The Colonel's Family but can see why - if one is being strictly literary, not reading it for historical value - a critic might say Bremer uses a curious...combination in her novels of the vapourishly affected and unreal with the most solidly Dutch sort of realism.
Translations and Translators
A recent Goodreads discussion (coincidentally under a review of Middlemarch) concluded that contemporary translators love dissing each other's work, as a way to sell more of their own, allegedly more accurate, versions. Here Eliot doesn't have her own editions of Kant or German lyric poetry to flog, but she's critical enough of others' translations when she sees fit, and of the shortage of good intellect among English translators in her day. Unlike the current lot, who concentrate on English rendering, she devotes half the piece to criticising Germans' translations of Shakespeare.
Woman in France: Madame de Sablé
The second of the essays in the book, and the longest. I read it last. Even more so than the piece on Wollestonecraft & Fuller, it begins as if masked. A certain disdain for the writing of women other than the French. This sentence: Heaven forbid that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! A typically C19th racialisation of nationalities in which it's determined likely, for physiological reasons, that a French woman has a greater chance of being intellectual than the 'heavier' Teutonic or English type; Eliot wouldn't have considered herself a petite, delicate French type. (Later she concentrates on the biography and life of the salonnière, and ends with an idealised exhortation about a mariage of minds.) The beginning reminds me of the mischievous early days of the internet, when you could be anyone you liked for a while if you could talk the talk; I miss that. But I would love to know what Eliot thought of this enterprise (published anonymously) and what writing like this meant to her. Was it a game, or a burden? Perhaps not the same one every time. Searched in Kathryn Hughes' biog of Eliot, which I read too long ago to remember unprompted: nothing from her letters about this piece, but it's implied that her ex-lover and sometime boss found it embarrassing and tried to distance himself, whilst still publishing it.
The opening lines: In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32 000 volumes. ... If the catalogue were available today, the addings in certain corners of Goodreads might crash the to-read lists.
Re. Madame herself; arguably the first salonnière: not much surprised me. I disapprove of my own judgement because what stood out most were some OCD-like tendencies around disease and cleanliness (though it made more sense then - and she made it to 70, which many didn't). I came back to an old favourite idea, that it was often people with more extreme temperaments, or who were unafraid of disapproval, who changed things. If you have unusually refined taste as she did, and are socially influential at the right time, you may change taste in your direction. She worried about certain things, but, whilst she and her salon influenced the cynical La Rochefoucauld, her own maxims are as full of the goodness which La Rochefoucauld wants, as they are empty of the style which he possesses. She is presented as one whose greatest talents were social, in drawing out the greatness of others [men].
Arguably it was a man, G.H. Lewes, who drew out Eliot's greatest talents whilst she wrote her novels.
-----------
Now, this is one of the reasons I don't read more books of essays. They make me want, near enough, to write another one in reply.
* My overall argument is always that one shouldn't blame the art (or product or whatever) as what the person gets from it, esp when young, is down to their predisposition, upbringing, environment etc. I could give those reasons for all of these wee first world problems. I just wanted to let off steam with a rant, the way I see some feminists ranting about how everyone loves, say, sleazy male narrators and doesn't question them. In their solar system the default response hasn't historically been - from anyone apart from a handful of critics who look further - "eww, creepy, I couldn't read it and I didn't like the character".
I've cut down on the number of community reviews I read on GR, and haven't looked at these ones on this page for a while. In general, the title would be controversial these days, because of the strand of [Anglo-American?] feminism which looks at highly feminised aspects of culture and how they have been devalued in some quarters. (This review discussion gives some recent examples in film without going into the politics.) Feminisms are ever contradictory, and the previous coexists alongside efforts to get manufacturers to make children's toys and products less gendered. (I suspect that the latter, as well as obviously being more characteristic of parents, includes women who are older than the predominantly-twentysomethings I see arguing online for the respect of 'girly' culture.) I've put off reading Eliot's essay a few times because I wasn't looking forward to writing a GR review in this tiringly push-me-pull-you context.
Here, in any case, is how I feel personally about this issue. Popular and commercial culture pushes these things very heavily, whether it's pink plastic toys, chicklit and its successors in fiction, or romcom films. In most contexts outside academic and intellectual circles (and even people who inhabit those circles may spend significant proportions of time outside them, e.g. students and artists in bill paying jobs, or anyone among certain relatives or friends) these things are considered 'normal'. They are hard to get away from. There is a bunch of stuff which seems to need defending mostly to specific corners of academia and the literati. If a man doesn't like sports or airport thrillers, he's only weird to the blokey blokes. If you're a woman and you reject romcoms and so forth, and would be happy never to hear any more about them for the rest of your life, you get wrong from both mainstream women and a bunch of feminists. Do the latter really know the purgatorial tedium of life in an office with a load of chicklit readers who subtly expect you to be more like them?
I am not interested in going around defending the essentialist culture which means Francine Pascal, creator of Sweet Valley High, is statistically my most-read author because of an idea I picked up when younger about 'trying to do things properly and normally' and the library had hundreds of her books. Or, earlier made me shy about asking for a Scalextric until after too much money had been spent on My Little Pony buildings and further large toys weren't allowed. Let alone a load of crap ideas about being a woman relative to relationships with men, which I got from magazines, occasional chicklit, and women's forums* - which it took years to realise didn't fit my personality and vague queerness. I know most feminists have a beef with those sources too, but the content of this culture they say is devalued is mostly full of crap and is over-valued in many quarters, and I think it's a terrible rallying point. As for knitting - well, trying that out again, inspired by a related fashion (although I knew I used to hate it) wasn't a good move, but at least I managed to sell most of the kit, and it's not pernicious like the above given its varied images these days.
There is always going to be popular culture. You don't have to like it, or all of it. If you don't, it's nice to have the luxury of an existence where you can ignore it most of the time. Not everyone who'd like to, does. Though some people put themselves in the way of stuff they dislike just so they can rant about it.
I don't know if George Eliot had to read the trashy popular novels of her day; quite possibly given that she made money from book reviewing. [How quaint!]
The title essay is wonderfully sardonic. I'd forgotten she could be funny.
Following a quote from a 'silly novel' in which a four-year old makes a long speech, including Ossianic similes of Scottish Highland scenery:
We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon, who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed by gin, is herself a phoenix.
On a villain:
He is not only a romantic poet, but a hardened rake and cynical wit; yet his deep passion for Lady Umfraville has so impoverished his epigrammatic talent, that he cuts a poor figure in conversation.
Facets of the novels she criticises are recognisable today. (Hm, if I'd never read any chicklit, I wouldn't be able to say this.)
- The 'mind and millinery' subgenre.
Chicklit heroines aren't necessarily advanced to great wealth - much as 'Shopaholic' would like - but those 90s-00s novels often feature characters with, or studying for, higher degrees who never talk as if they're academic; one allusion to a topic will apparently do fine to convince, and the rest of the time the person (male or female) is a bland airhead.
Eliot lambasts and quotes long and improbable philosophical speeches made by heroines of Victorian popular fiction. They are indeed silly. However, at least they show the woman thinks in detail about the subjects she's alleged to.
These very brainy heroines evidently have no novelty in Eliot's time - just as, in the contemporary British fictional world, Oxbridge would award millions of degrees whilst other universities were almost empty. Taking a longer historical view, it seems like significant progress that these women are intelligent and agentic in a way that Samuel Richardson's heroines would barely be able to conceive of. Young female readers of the 1850s were dreaming of being a different sort of person - more modern and less passive than I'd assumed. Titles and money, though, remain essential to their leverage - as middle-class Eliot points out.
Interesting to see 'frothy' used - I'd understood it to be a contemporary entertainment and publishing industry adjective for romcom/chicklit material, not well understood elsewhere. (I'd tried it out a few times.) It's evidently quite old.
- The 'oracular' novels' closest contemporary equivalent may be New Age tinged books like Eat Pray Love. Or perhaps books that assume angels are real. Or 'Christian fiction', which one rarely comes across in the UK without looking specifically - I know little about it, though suspect it's more like the Evangelical novels Eliot also has a go at. The 'oracular' is a more specifically Victorian phenomenon, with characteristic gothic-tinged landscapes alongside a dash of High Church Anglicanism.
Popular historical novels of the day were apparently inclined to the overly grandiloquent an humourless. These days we have other tropes, such as 'the only modern man' and thousands of heroines with contemporary feminist values who somehow grew up hundreds of years ago, with conservative parents. The tendency to write about aristocrats has lessened, though not so much we don't recognise her complaints.
Eliot's principal objection to these authors, though, is ultimately because the status of women still had a long way to go. She is concerned they may hamper advancement, by making it look as if educating a woman produces someone who shows off their learning pompously, inaccurately and at inopportune moments. [Did many men actually read these books, however?] Her summation of the silly lady novelists makes them sound a lot like know-it-all callow teenagers who show off whenever they can, in order to assert their sense of superiority, whilst coming off as naive and embarrassing to those a little older. Perhaps the level of respect, responsibility and access to information commonly given to women at the time made them feel similarly to these teenagers - and only the very strongest personalities and talents, such as Eliot, broke through that, their success also aided to one extent or another by luck and other circumstances.
Already a problem 150 years ago, and infinitely worse now, is another issue she raises: a great many people write bad books and, not knowing how bad they are, have them published. As she says, it's easy for a person to know if they are tone deaf as regards music; less so in writing fiction.
Eliot's writing is infinitely clearer and more readable than the overly ornate quotes from the 'silly novels'. I find the books interesting to hear about, but not to the extent of those people who write theses on them - am grateful for the excerpts.
-----------
This Penguin Great Ideas book also contains five other essays.
[Incidentally, I hope the series eventually contains more than two volumes by women dealing with primary subjects other than feminism.]
Geraldine Jewsbury's Constance Herbert
Review of a largely forgotten novel, about three sisters who decide not to marry so they don't pass on inherited insanity in their family. (I wonder if it was something we now know to be multifactorial, or a disease like Huntington's, where in the absence of testing and contraception this sounds a good decision.) Jewsbury makes all the rejected suitors turn out to be awful. Eliot takes issue with 'the very questionable satisfaction of discovering that objects once cherished were in fact worthless'. I agree that it's good to have something nice to remember if one must give up on some part of life.
Also interesting to see that even Eliot appears to subscribe to the view, perhaps influenced by the rise of science, that there are single ultimate truths waiting to be discerned about a) what men want from women in relationships (so many terrible self-help books talk as if there were) and b) the [then-current] position of women in society.
Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollestonecraft
Am unfamiliar with Fuller; at any rate, Eliot finds many commonalities between the writings of these two early feminists, published 50 years apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic. One could see the essay as, initially, written in drag, in the voice of a moderate chap who thinks things should be improved a little for women, but we shouldn't exaggerate the abilities of the poor dears. However, this belies an argument evidently important to Eliot, used not just later in this essay, but also about black American slaves in the following piece about Harriet Beecher Stowe: if these people are portrayed as such paragons of virtue whilst they are oppressed, is that not dangerously close to arguing that their oppressed state is good for them and for society, and that they may be less virtuous and able if given more freedom? It's not one heard these days, in my experience; any rate it says a lot about Victorian society and is interesting from that viewpoint.
Bits and pieces about how men and women interact in relationships, now considered to be down to personalities and attachment styles, were, it seems, commonly thought to be all - not just partly - about educational level. I found something similar in Frederika Bremer, Eliot's review of whom is also in this collection. It's one of those opinions probably necessary at the time in order to effect social change, and which would eventually be revised.
Having read a little of Wollestonecraft's biography, I would love to know if she was criticising "the clinging affection of ignorance" - as mentioned in a long quote - from a viewpoint of self-awareness.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred, Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late To Mend and Fredrika Bremer's Hertha
Apparently people loved Dred at the time; it's hardly known of now in the UK; not sure about the US. The Reade sounds laughably formulaic - it even features farmers named Fielding and Meadows - though Eliot writes of it as we might of a reasonable but not top-notch bit of contemporary litfic. I used qualifiers 'largely forgotten' and 'hardly known' earlier because I have read Bremer, who's far from famous here now. Eliot writes of the Swede's previous books as a half-forgotten craze of ten years previously. I quite enjoyed The Colonel's Family but can see why - if one is being strictly literary, not reading it for historical value - a critic might say Bremer uses a curious...combination in her novels of the vapourishly affected and unreal with the most solidly Dutch sort of realism.
Translations and Translators
A recent Goodreads discussion (coincidentally under a review of Middlemarch) concluded that contemporary translators love dissing each other's work, as a way to sell more of their own, allegedly more accurate, versions. Here Eliot doesn't have her own editions of Kant or German lyric poetry to flog, but she's critical enough of others' translations when she sees fit, and of the shortage of good intellect among English translators in her day. Unlike the current lot, who concentrate on English rendering, she devotes half the piece to criticising Germans' translations of Shakespeare.
Woman in France: Madame de Sablé
The second of the essays in the book, and the longest. I read it last. Even more so than the piece on Wollestonecraft & Fuller, it begins as if masked. A certain disdain for the writing of women other than the French. This sentence: Heaven forbid that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! A typically C19th racialisation of nationalities in which it's determined likely, for physiological reasons, that a French woman has a greater chance of being intellectual than the 'heavier' Teutonic or English type; Eliot wouldn't have considered herself a petite, delicate French type. (Later she concentrates on the biography and life of the salonnière, and ends with an idealised exhortation about a mariage of minds.) The beginning reminds me of the mischievous early days of the internet, when you could be anyone you liked for a while if you could talk the talk; I miss that. But I would love to know what Eliot thought of this enterprise (published anonymously) and what writing like this meant to her. Was it a game, or a burden? Perhaps not the same one every time. Searched in Kathryn Hughes' biog of Eliot, which I read too long ago to remember unprompted: nothing from her letters about this piece, but it's implied that her ex-lover and sometime boss found it embarrassing and tried to distance himself, whilst still publishing it.
The opening lines: In 1847, a certain Count Leopold Ferri died at Padua, leaving a library composed of works written by women, in various languages, and this library amounted to nearly 32 000 volumes. ... If the catalogue were available today, the addings in certain corners of Goodreads might crash the to-read lists.
Re. Madame herself; arguably the first salonnière: not much surprised me. I disapprove of my own judgement because what stood out most were some OCD-like tendencies around disease and cleanliness (though it made more sense then - and she made it to 70, which many didn't). I came back to an old favourite idea, that it was often people with more extreme temperaments, or who were unafraid of disapproval, who changed things. If you have unusually refined taste as she did, and are socially influential at the right time, you may change taste in your direction. She worried about certain things, but, whilst she and her salon influenced the cynical La Rochefoucauld, her own maxims are as full of the goodness which La Rochefoucauld wants, as they are empty of the style which he possesses. She is presented as one whose greatest talents were social, in drawing out the greatness of others [men].
Arguably it was a man, G.H. Lewes, who drew out Eliot's greatest talents whilst she wrote her novels.
-----------
Now, this is one of the reasons I don't read more books of essays. They make me want, near enough, to write another one in reply.
* My overall argument is always that one shouldn't blame the art (or product or whatever) as what the person gets from it, esp when young, is down to their predisposition, upbringing, environment etc. I could give those reasons for all of these wee first world problems. I just wanted to let off steam with a rant, the way I see some feminists ranting about how everyone loves, say, sleazy male narrators and doesn't question them. In their solar system the default response hasn't historically been - from anyone apart from a handful of critics who look further - "eww, creepy, I couldn't read it and I didn't like the character".
February 18, 2023
Too brutal for my taste and the fact that it was written anonymously kind of makes this article an act of cowardice. She is the 19th century version of our modern-age keyboard critics who abstain confrontation but make brutally bold comments online.
Yes it is funny and she has good points but I do not approve of this.
Yes it is funny and she has good points but I do not approve of this.
September 23, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
George Eliot really said, “enough with the fainting heroines and pompous nonsense” and dragged a whole genre by its wig. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is basically 19th-century literary roasting at its finest—sarcastic, ruthless, and laugh-out-loud funny if you enjoy watching clichés get demolished. What I loved most is that she wasn’t hating on women for writing, but for writing badly—and demanding that female authors be taken seriously when they actually wrote with depth and intelligence. Honestly, it feels way too modern for something written in 1856, like the snark could’ve been a Twitter thread. Savage, smart, and still relevant.
George Eliot really said, “enough with the fainting heroines and pompous nonsense” and dragged a whole genre by its wig. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists is basically 19th-century literary roasting at its finest—sarcastic, ruthless, and laugh-out-loud funny if you enjoy watching clichés get demolished. What I loved most is that she wasn’t hating on women for writing, but for writing badly—and demanding that female authors be taken seriously when they actually wrote with depth and intelligence. Honestly, it feels way too modern for something written in 1856, like the snark could’ve been a Twitter thread. Savage, smart, and still relevant.
June 3, 2016
Only a female author can get away with writing anything with a title like that, I think. Eliot rips into her less able contemporaries with sweeping and scathing judgements that sometimes made me chuckle out loud. More seriously, though, she rightly observes that the tawdry produce of many writers at the time led to the perpetuation of negative stereotypes, and thus justifying the continued subjection of women. One can easily see why Eliot - along with other authors of the time, such as the Brontës - chose to use a male pseudonym.
Apart from the title essay, this little collection includes a number of Eliot's reviews, the substance of which was largely beyond me, but the purpose of which is to expound her central point in more detail.
Apart from the title essay, this little collection includes a number of Eliot's reviews, the substance of which was largely beyond me, but the purpose of which is to expound her central point in more detail.
December 20, 2014
It has taken me ages to read this fairly short little book. It has been weighing heavily on my mind, and yet I haven't been able to concentrate on it fully. Non-fiction has never agreed with me when stressed, and apparently Eliot is no exception to this rule in spite of my eternal love for her writing.
The titular essay in "Silly Novels" is by far the best. In it Eliot discusses the ridiculous amount of female novels in the romantic era; the sensation novelist writing about a beautiful main character who falls in love with a duke under drastic circumstances.
Eliot argues that the many silly novels give a bad name to the female novelist in general, making it impossible for the actual talented female writers to get recognition for their work and therefore forcing them to take on a pseudonym (as Eliot in fact did herself).
The remaining essays are very period-specific, focusing on a particular work and making it hard for the modern reader who perhaps haven't read all of the novels which are being discussed by Eliot. I did however find the essay comparing Margaret Fuller to Mary Wollstonecraft very interesting as well.
All in all – an interesting little collection of essays, but very dated and very specific. Sometimes even limited in their very Victorian outlook on the world.
The titular essay in "Silly Novels" is by far the best. In it Eliot discusses the ridiculous amount of female novels in the romantic era; the sensation novelist writing about a beautiful main character who falls in love with a duke under drastic circumstances.
Eliot argues that the many silly novels give a bad name to the female novelist in general, making it impossible for the actual talented female writers to get recognition for their work and therefore forcing them to take on a pseudonym (as Eliot in fact did herself).
The remaining essays are very period-specific, focusing on a particular work and making it hard for the modern reader who perhaps haven't read all of the novels which are being discussed by Eliot. I did however find the essay comparing Margaret Fuller to Mary Wollstonecraft very interesting as well.
All in all – an interesting little collection of essays, but very dated and very specific. Sometimes even limited in their very Victorian outlook on the world.
July 14, 2019
«Un buen nuemero de grandes escritoras, tanto vivas como fallecidas, acude a nuestra memoria como prueba de que las mujeres pueden darnos novelas no solo buenas, sino entre las mejores del mundo».
Excelente ensayo.
Excelente ensayo.
January 30, 2024
Interesante crítica a modo de ensayo sobre las novelas de poca calidad escritas por mujeres a mediados del siglo XIX.
August 23, 2018
Ensayo mordaz, una crítica aguda cargada de ironía. Los ejemplos de los que se sirve la autora están muy bien seleccionados. Y creo que este género que ella denomina "de artimaña y confección" puede aplicarse no sólo a la novela romántica, sino también a las películas y telenovelas. Veo lejano el día que estas historias edulcoradas de heroínas que enamoran a todo hombre rico terminen. Por lo que este ensayo no ha perdido vigencia.
Lectura para reír y reflexionar.
Lectura para reír y reflexionar.
September 1, 2015
Cuando empecé a leer no sabía que lo que tenía entre manos era un ensayo. Creía que sería una novela muy cortita del género que critica la autora jajajajaja
Ha sido curioso ver cómo desmenuza este tipo de novelas. A partir de ahora las leeré recordando este ensayo
Ha sido curioso ver cómo desmenuza este tipo de novelas. A partir de ahora las leeré recordando este ensayo
March 8, 2021
Un ensayo muy bien escrito, pero me parece demasiado crítico no solo con un género que a George Eliot le parece inferior, sino también con las escritoras de dicho género, lo que no me ha gustado nada.
July 25, 2025
1.5☆
heavily disagree with like, everything. it just seems to me like a terrible attempt to take down or discourage the competition. i do agree with some specific points, but overall it's in terrible taste. not a girl's girl❌️✋️
it was super useful for my school assignment though😛😛 so that's nice
heavily disagree with like, everything. it just seems to me like a terrible attempt to take down or discourage the competition. i do agree with some specific points, but overall it's in terrible taste. not a girl's girl❌️✋️
it was super useful for my school assignment though😛😛 so that's nice
November 21, 2019
I have not read the silly novels she critiques, but still, I get her point.
“Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
Eliot was angry that depictions of women (and men, for that matter) by these silly lady novelists were not real, that novelists need to take the time to really look at people, all people, people doing real things, before providing us a picture of them.
Then she went and did just that.
“A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man … does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture,--she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence.”
“Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
Eliot was angry that depictions of women (and men, for that matter) by these silly lady novelists were not real, that novelists need to take the time to really look at people, all people, people doing real things, before providing us a picture of them.
Then she went and did just that.
“A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man … does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture,--she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence.”
October 2, 2020
Algunas #escritoras lograron sortear prejuicios de hombres editores y #lectores , y también de mujeres #lectoras , gracias al uso de pseudónimos masculinos. O al “Anónimo”, como la primera edición de Frankenstein de #MaryShelly . Pero de ese abanico, abundante pero no tanto, pocas han sobrevivido con la importancia de Mary Ann Evans aka #GeorgeEliot (más de su vida en las fotos)
✊
Burlándose de todos los prejuicios habidos y por haber de su época (incluso fue de las primeras en denunciar el creciente antisemitismo que se divisaba en el siglo XIX y que luego en el XX tendría trágicas consecuencias), esta inglesa vivió una vida libre y de éxitos editoriales.
💔
En “Las novelas tontas de ciertas damas novelistas”, disecciona con ese humor ácido tan british todos los estereotipos de las novelas románticas más insulsas. Anticipándose a la filosofía del escritor comprometido con las cuestiones de su tiempo de un #Sartre , critica el rol de las mujeres que crean historias que perpetúan un imaginario de mujeres tontas, puras hasta el extremo y rodeadas de personajes acartonados y caricaturescos inmersos en situaciones totalmente alejadas de la realidad. También arremete contra ciertas novelas de tipo moralista, a las que llama “oraculares”, en las que se pretende filosofar o dejar algún tipo de enseñanza que hoy llamaríamos New Age.
📝
No se olvida de la industria que privilegia las novelitas insípidas y sosas que no representan una verdadera amenaza al pensamiento impuesto por el status quo. Se indigna, en varios pasajes, de la escasa o nula preparación de las personas que se hacen llamar #escritores , y que buscan publicar libros por un afán de prestigio snobista. En su opinión, este tipo de personas denigran la profesión.
📺
El breve ensayo, que nos hará reir en varias ocasiones, será difícil pasarlo por alto una vez leído y no podremos dejar de pensar no solo en la #literatura sino, incluso, en el culebrón más ridículo que conozcamos. Tal su es vigencia.
✊
Burlándose de todos los prejuicios habidos y por haber de su época (incluso fue de las primeras en denunciar el creciente antisemitismo que se divisaba en el siglo XIX y que luego en el XX tendría trágicas consecuencias), esta inglesa vivió una vida libre y de éxitos editoriales.
💔
En “Las novelas tontas de ciertas damas novelistas”, disecciona con ese humor ácido tan british todos los estereotipos de las novelas románticas más insulsas. Anticipándose a la filosofía del escritor comprometido con las cuestiones de su tiempo de un #Sartre , critica el rol de las mujeres que crean historias que perpetúan un imaginario de mujeres tontas, puras hasta el extremo y rodeadas de personajes acartonados y caricaturescos inmersos en situaciones totalmente alejadas de la realidad. También arremete contra ciertas novelas de tipo moralista, a las que llama “oraculares”, en las que se pretende filosofar o dejar algún tipo de enseñanza que hoy llamaríamos New Age.
📝
No se olvida de la industria que privilegia las novelitas insípidas y sosas que no representan una verdadera amenaza al pensamiento impuesto por el status quo. Se indigna, en varios pasajes, de la escasa o nula preparación de las personas que se hacen llamar #escritores , y que buscan publicar libros por un afán de prestigio snobista. En su opinión, este tipo de personas denigran la profesión.
📺
El breve ensayo, que nos hará reir en varias ocasiones, será difícil pasarlo por alto una vez leído y no podremos dejar de pensar no solo en la #literatura sino, incluso, en el culebrón más ridículo que conozcamos. Tal su es vigencia.
September 16, 2015
Reading George Eliot's non-fiction/literary reviews was quite refreshing and intriguing, as I had only read her fiction before.
The first essay, 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', which is also the one that gives this collection its title, is the one that initially piqued my interest in purchasing this book. Eliot makes some specific references to some books written by lady novelists at her time, which she does not quite think deserve to be called literary achievements. The heroines of such novels are usually extremely intelligent and extremely well-educated (some of them are able to read Greek and Latin classics in the original languages, despite their young age) and are often admired by the men that surround them, who also appear to be rather jealous of their literary magnificence. Eliot's writing is witty, poignant and it makes you smile in understanding at most of the points she makes. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the rest of the essays in this collection. Most of them were focused on specific authors or specific works and critiqued them, but since I was not at all familiar with any of these works or authors, I couldn't really find them interesting. The second essay, focused on French women writers (and particularly on Madame de Sablé) and even though it was informative, I found it too long and full of details.
I had high hopes for the last essay, titled 'Translations and Translators', since I find this topic very interesting, but I was kind of disappointed here, too. It was a very short piece that focused mainly on German translations, and since I don't know German at all, I couldn't, once again, relate in the slightest.
Despite my inability to fully appreciate most of the essays due to their topics, I really enjoyed Eliot's writing style and it made me want to seek more of her non-fiction works.
The first essay, 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', which is also the one that gives this collection its title, is the one that initially piqued my interest in purchasing this book. Eliot makes some specific references to some books written by lady novelists at her time, which she does not quite think deserve to be called literary achievements. The heroines of such novels are usually extremely intelligent and extremely well-educated (some of them are able to read Greek and Latin classics in the original languages, despite their young age) and are often admired by the men that surround them, who also appear to be rather jealous of their literary magnificence. Eliot's writing is witty, poignant and it makes you smile in understanding at most of the points she makes. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the rest of the essays in this collection. Most of them were focused on specific authors or specific works and critiqued them, but since I was not at all familiar with any of these works or authors, I couldn't really find them interesting. The second essay, focused on French women writers (and particularly on Madame de Sablé) and even though it was informative, I found it too long and full of details.
I had high hopes for the last essay, titled 'Translations and Translators', since I find this topic very interesting, but I was kind of disappointed here, too. It was a very short piece that focused mainly on German translations, and since I don't know German at all, I couldn't, once again, relate in the slightest.
Despite my inability to fully appreciate most of the essays due to their topics, I really enjoyed Eliot's writing style and it made me want to seek more of her non-fiction works.
April 16, 2016
A partir del análisis de las obras femeninas más populares del momento, la autora analiza y critica con humor ácido e ironía, la producción literaria femenina del S. XIX.
En este ensayo, George Eliot denuncia la falta de calidad literaria femenina que atribuye, entre otras cosas, a la mala educación cultural de las mujeres de la época y a la falta de autocrítica de éstas y a la falta de criterio de sus lectoras.
Pero el trasfondo va más allá del intrusismo literario, extendiendo esta situación de precariedad literaria a la sociedad machista en la que se desarrolla esta creación mediocre. Y en la que el hombre, en la mayoría de los casos, la asume como algo natural en la condición de la mujer, a la que incapacita injustamente sin darle oportunidades para desarrollar su intelecto. Los prejuicios machistas fomentaron la utilización de seudónimos masculinos y relegaron a muchas creadoras válidas a producir en la sombra y el posterior olvido.
En este ensayo, George Eliot denuncia la falta de calidad literaria femenina que atribuye, entre otras cosas, a la mala educación cultural de las mujeres de la época y a la falta de autocrítica de éstas y a la falta de criterio de sus lectoras.
Pero el trasfondo va más allá del intrusismo literario, extendiendo esta situación de precariedad literaria a la sociedad machista en la que se desarrolla esta creación mediocre. Y en la que el hombre, en la mayoría de los casos, la asume como algo natural en la condición de la mujer, a la que incapacita injustamente sin darle oportunidades para desarrollar su intelecto. Los prejuicios machistas fomentaron la utilización de seudónimos masculinos y relegaron a muchas creadoras válidas a producir en la sombra y el posterior olvido.
July 2, 2017
4*
Qué pena que buena parte de este debate siga tan vivo hoy en día.
(Pero que no se nos olvide que, aunque escriban las autoras, el concepto de "literatura femenina" no fue cosa suya, y mucho menos su posición en el canon).
Qué pena que buena parte de este debate siga tan vivo hoy en día.
(Pero que no se nos olvide que, aunque escriban las autoras, el concepto de "literatura femenina" no fue cosa suya, y mucho menos su posición en el canon).
January 29, 2022
Para ser sincera, me costó un poco entrar en la ironía y el objeto de la ingeniosa crítica que es el tema de este artículo. Culpar a la fatuidad femenina de la falta de respeto hacia la literatura hecha por mujeres me parecía evadir el origen mismo de la necesidad de la distinción de género. A medida que avancé en la lectura empecé a comprender que las razones de este ataque está justamente en lo perjudicial que resulta la ausencia de modestia y verdadera inteligencia de estas mujeres para la causa de la igualdad, en la literatura o en cualquier otro campo. Lo increíble es que este género de novelas sigue sano y bien, y eso nos debería hacer reflexionar por qué.
Acabo citando a la autora: Un buen número de grandes escritoras, tanto vivas como fallecidas, acude a nuestra memoria como prueba de que las mujeres pueden darnos novelas no solo buenas, sino entre las mejores del mundo; novelas, además, con un valioso carácter propio, cuyas cualidades y vivencias son distintas de las que aparecen en las novelas escritas por hombres. Al no haber restricciones educativas que impidan a las mujeres acceder a los instrumentos de la ficción, no existe ninguna clase de arte tan libre de requisitos que lo constriñan. Cual si de una masa cristalina se tratara, este arte puede adoptar cualquier forma y seguir siendo hermoso. Solo hay que llenarlo con los elementos adecuados: la observación genuina, el humor y la pasión. Esta ausencia de requisitos rígidos es, sin embargo, lo que constituye la fatídica atracción de la escritura para las mujeres incompetentes.
Acabo citando a la autora: Un buen número de grandes escritoras, tanto vivas como fallecidas, acude a nuestra memoria como prueba de que las mujeres pueden darnos novelas no solo buenas, sino entre las mejores del mundo; novelas, además, con un valioso carácter propio, cuyas cualidades y vivencias son distintas de las que aparecen en las novelas escritas por hombres. Al no haber restricciones educativas que impidan a las mujeres acceder a los instrumentos de la ficción, no existe ninguna clase de arte tan libre de requisitos que lo constriñan. Cual si de una masa cristalina se tratara, este arte puede adoptar cualquier forma y seguir siendo hermoso. Solo hay que llenarlo con los elementos adecuados: la observación genuina, el humor y la pasión. Esta ausencia de requisitos rígidos es, sin embargo, lo que constituye la fatídica atracción de la escritura para las mujeres incompetentes.
May 14, 2023
God, she just rips them to shreds… I love it!
George Eliot is a phenomenal writer and in her essay she flawlessly illustrates the problem with “silly lady novelists” with quite a lot of wit and a teeny tiny touch of pretentiousness (same).
I often had to chuckle while reading…
Here’s one of my favourite quotes:
“Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
George Eliot is a phenomenal writer and in her essay she flawlessly illustrates the problem with “silly lady novelists” with quite a lot of wit and a teeny tiny touch of pretentiousness (same).
I often had to chuckle while reading…
Here’s one of my favourite quotes:
“Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
September 3, 2024
Πλάκα είχε
February 2, 2024
I stopped reading after Silly Novels by Lady Novelists because the other essays didn’t really interest me, but I enjoyed reading Eliot’s views on the subject. I liked her humour & irony, the opening was especially good
July 6, 2024
Φυσικά και ξέρω πως όποιο βιβλίο και να διαλέξεις από τις Εκδόσεις ΠΟΤΑΜΟΣ θα είναι από πολύ καλό και πάνω, αλλά κανείς δε με είχε προετοιμάσει για μια αδιανόητη αναγνωστική απόλαυση που διακοπτόταν μόνο από τα ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΙΚΑ δάκρυα γέλιου!
Καταπληκτικό
Καταπληκτικό
February 9, 2020
Un ensayo de mujer a mujer, recordando la importancia de hacer valer la sustancia por encima de cualquier deseo o ímpetu equivocado por escribir y publicar. Un llamado de atención hacia el valor de lo discreto por encima de lo que brilla o hace ruido para desaparecer efímero sin decir realmente nada. ¿Cuál es el peso real del atropello por 'dejar marca'? ¿Cuál es la verdadera marca, el atropello, la firma, o una tradición sensible y coherente?
March 15, 2025
Inteligente y certera crítica sobre lo que la autora nos deja claro en el titulo. Desmenuza cada una de las “subespecies” de novelas femeninas de la época, con ejemplos concretos y demoledora claridad, siempre sin perder el humor y el sentido común. Las insufribles escritoras de estas novelas femeninas quedan a la altura del betún, de donde no deberían de haber salido nunca. Imprescindible.
June 17, 2021
Devorei, pois bem curtinho. A apresentação de Emannuela Siqueira me instigou a vontade de outras leituras, desde reler Um teto todo seu e A leitora incomum (ambos de Virgina Woolf) até finalmente dar uma chance a Ursula (Maria Firmina dos Reis). A leitura do ensaio me lembrou, na verve, da de Um teto todo seu que viria décadas depois e dá pra fazer um contraponto muito interessante. E as ideias que a autora traz não funcionam apenas como um comentário ao seu tempo, mas são relacionáveis aos tempos de hoje: pensei em autores de fantasia que se inspiram sempre numa Europa Medieval e pensei também nas minhas tentativas infantis/pré-adolescentes de escrever poesia contando histórias arraigadas num imaginário evangélico com cenários dos desenhos da Disney. Gostei bastante da leitura e já deu pra sentir que é desses textos que só ganham nas releituras, de tempos em tempos (algo que sempre rola com os da Woolf). Recomendo.
June 7, 2018
Me he divertido mucho leyendo este libro, en el que la autora destripa de la manera más cruel posible algunas novelas románticas victorianas, haciendo gala de una ironía exquisita. No me extraña que, para evitar comparaciones, Mary Ann Evans decidiera escribir usando un pseudónimo masculino.
Por cierto, que la vida de la escritora daría para muchos libros ya que fue una adelantada a su época, tanto personal como profesionalmente: buscó su independencia económica a la muerte de su padre; vivía sola hasta la treintena; fue novelista, poetisa, periodista y traductora; fundó una editorial; convivió con un hombre casado hasta que este falleció (del que tomó su nombre para usar como pseudónimo); y, posteriormente, se casó con un hombre veinte años más joven que él. Una mujer admirable!!!
Por cierto, que la vida de la escritora daría para muchos libros ya que fue una adelantada a su época, tanto personal como profesionalmente: buscó su independencia económica a la muerte de su padre; vivía sola hasta la treintena; fue novelista, poetisa, periodista y traductora; fundó una editorial; convivió con un hombre casado hasta que este falleció (del que tomó su nombre para usar como pseudónimo); y, posteriormente, se casó con un hombre veinte años más joven que él. Una mujer admirable!!!
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