"Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"

Published in October 1856 in The Westminster Review

Summary
In the essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," Eliot criticizes several genres of novel that she believes to be of little to no literary value and which cause harm by encouraging melodrama in women and a belief in men that education does not improve women. First Eliot describes the heroines of these novels as being beautiful, clever, and having perfectly correct morals and feelings: "She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces" (Eliot). She ironically wonders at these heroines' perfection. Eliot then criticizeööööös several aspects of these genre novels produced by women who are writing with no talent in order satisfy their vanity, confusing regurgitation of plots, characters, and morals with the literary skills of "patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer's art" (Eliot). The aristocratic nature of all plots and characters, the lack of realism, the over-wrought and unnatural language, and morally superior tone common among many of this type of novel are subject to Eliot's criticism, and she provides many examples.

Eliot explains how the women who write these novels volunteer "themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect," which thus may persuade men to believe that women are intellectually inferior and are in fact disimproved by education, as it makes them vain and insufferable in their boasting and quoting of literary knowledge in public and moral superior attitude to those around them. She contrasts this image with a "really" cultured woman: "A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself" (Eliot).

Lastly, Eliot explains that, contrary to popular belief, lady novelists are not often "destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other 'lady-like' means of getting their bread," but rather are upper-class wealthy women who "write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen" (Eliot). In this way, Eliot explains that we need not sympathize with the "lady novelists" because they are only writing in order to make ends meet, and thus we need not feel bad for criticizing them for their output. Reviewers are apt to praise the bad writing of lady novelists under this impression that they have no other course to turn to in order to make a living and thus pity them, but then harshly critique women with real talent as if they were men. Eliot claims that these talentless lady novelists are misrepresenting "the mass of feminine literature, and that while few women who write well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who write ill are very far below it" (Eliot). Thus, critics who justly criticize the bad writing of female authors are doing a service by discouraging women of less talen from writing. Eliot closes her essay claiming that women are equal to men in the ability to write fiction, showing that she is not denigrating all women writers, just those who publish these novels of poor quality to flatter themselves.

Find full text of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" here: http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/ENGL618/readings/theory/EliotSillyNovels.pdf

Relationship with The Way We Live Now
Lady Carbury, the authoress in The Way We Live Now fits many of Eliot's descriptions of a silly lady novelist. Lady Carbury views her writing as a job, and puts very little value into the creative qualities Eliot values. She describes the way in which she forces herself to sit down and write out a certain number of pages a day, and the narrator claims that Lady Carbury herself realizes that her books are not really breaking any ground.

Eliot describes a genre of novel that she calls "the modern-antique species" as "perhaps, the least readable of silly women's novels" (Eliot). In this genre of novel, the author chooses a historical even and fictionalizes it, with what Eliot believes to be limited historical knowledge and creative ingenuity: "this form of imaginative power must always be among the very rarest, because it demands as much accurate and minute knowledge as creative vigour. Yet we find ladies constantly choosing to make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous, by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of Roman vestals or Egyptian princesses, and attributing their rhetorical arguments to Jewish high-priests and Greek philosophers" (Eliot).

This type of "historical fiction" (as we might call it today) describes how I imagine Lady Carbury's first book the "Criminal Queens." The "Criminal Queens" describes the lives of some female rulers, including Anne Boleyn, Cleopatra, and Joan of Arc. Lady Carbury creates these biographies by patch-working information that she finds in other books, and making up some "facts" when her limited source material is insufficient or in order to try to make the stories of these women's lives more scandalous and interesting to read about. From Lady Carbury's own description of her book to the newspaper editors, and their responses, it is clear that Lady Carbury is taking historical events and alterring them. In Mr. Broune's review, he claims that Lady Carbury's feminine spin on these stories makes them a pleasure to read. This certainly seems like a nice way of saying what Eliot is criticizing as the "feeble sentimentality," "minute knowledge and creative vigour" (Eliot).

However, Lady Carbury is the type of lady author who writes (at least in part) for money. Since her son Sir Felix Carbury is spending all her inheritance she needs to find some appropriate occupation in order to try to bring more money into the household. Despite Lady Carbury's desire to make money from her craft, she also finds her vanity flattered by the idea that she is a clever woman and good writer, and thus is also writing in order to please her vanity and to try to move up in literary society. Thus, though Eliot claims that most female writers are wealthy, which is not true of Lady Carbury, Lady Carbury fits into Eliot's perception of these female writers as writing quickly and with little skill, and in order to boost their self-esteem and position in society.

The ways in which the newspaper editors respond to the "Criminal Queens" also relates to Eliot's criticism of the reception of silly novels. Mr. Broune likes Lady Carbury, and though he knows her book isn't good, he gives it a good review because he feels sorry for her. This is exactly the type of review that Eliot claims hurts the reputation of women as writers and intelligent beings. By giving women a free pass on their bad writing just because they are women, Mr. Broune is actually lowering the opinions about female writing ability of his readership.

See References to Women and Literacy in The Way We Live Now : #WomenReading

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