Page 153 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The .................... in English literature began in second quarter of the nineteenth century and
ended by 1900.
2. Dickens, Thackeray, .................... wrote with a definite purpose to sweep away error and
reveal the underlying truth of humanity.
3. .................... not only continued during the Victorian Age, but it appeared in new forms.
4. The Victorian Age, therefore, exhibits a very interesting and complex mixture of two
opposing element .................... and Romanticism.
5. In Fact after 1870 we find that the romantic inspiration was again in the ascendent in the
shape of the pre-Raphaelite and .................... .

19.2 Women Novelists

The Victorian era is known for the galaxy of female novelists that it threw up. They include Mrs.
Trollope, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Marsh Mrs. Bray, Mrs. Henry Wood, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Oliphant,
Mrs. Lynn Lynfon, M. E. Braddon, “Ouida,” Rhoda Broughton, Edna Lyall, and still many more
now justly forgotten, but the four most important women novelists, who yet are quite important,
are :
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
Emile Bronte (1818-1848)
Mrs. Gaskell (1810-1865)
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Mrs. Gaskell may need some special pleading for being included among the rank of the great
women novelists of the Victorian era, but as for the rest, their place in the history of English
literature appears to be secure enough. Of the four, the two first-named were sisters and their
methods and achievements as novelists met at many planes. But each of the remaining two pursued
her own line and made herself known in the field of English novel in her own particular way.
After these preliminary remarks, let us consider individually the work and achievement of the
important women novelists of the Victorian era.

19.2.1 Charlotte Bronte

The three Bronte sisters-Anne, Charlotte, and Emily-collectively known often as the “stormy
sisterhood,” who took the England of their time by storm, were in actual life shy and isolated girls
with rather uneventful lives. All of them died young and died of tuberculosis as their two other
“non-literary” sisters did. They were daughters of a strict Irish person who made them lead a life
of what Compton-Rickett calls, “the sternest self-repression.” But behind their outwardly rippleless
lives lurked tempest-tossed souls which found an outlet in their novels which are all so patently
autobiographic. They poured their inner life into the mould of the novel. This consideration leads
Hugh Walker to assert: “The Brontes belong to that class of writers whom it is impossible to
understand except through the medium of biography.” But too much of preoccupation with
biography should not be allowed to lead us to a lopsided appreciation of their novels. Thus
Samuel C. Chew observes: “The three Bronte sisters have been overlaid with so much biography,
criticism, and conjecture that in reading about them there is danger lest their own books be left
unread.” Charlotte Bronte wrote the following four novels:
The Professor
Vuette
Jane Eyre
Shirley

146 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY