The women novelists

“The provision, then, which we have here made, is no other than Human Nature: nor do I fear that any sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended because I have named but one article. The tortoise, as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience, besides the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject.

“An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too vulgar and common; for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it was sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops.

“But the whole, to continue the metaphor, consists in the cooking of the author; for, as Mr. Pope tells us,--

‘True wit is nature to advantage dress’d; What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.’

“The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded in another part, and some of his limbs gibbetted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town. Where then lies the difference between the food of the nobleman and the porter, if both are at dinner on the same ox or calf, but in the seasoning, the dressing, the garnishing, and the setting forth? Hence the one provokes and incites the most languid appetite, and the other turns and palls that which is the sharpest and keenest.

“In like manner the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the author’s skill in well dressing it up. How pleased, therefore, will the reader be to find that we have, in the following work, adhered closely to one of the highest principles of the best cook which the present age, or perhaps that of Heliogabalus, hath produced? This great man, as is well known to all lovers of polite eating, begins at first by setting plain things before his hungry guests, rising afterwards by degrees, as their stomachs may be supposed to decrease, to the very quintessence of sauce and spices.

“In like manner we shall represent human nature at first, to the keen appetite of our reader, in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country, and shall hereafter hash and ragout it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford. By these means, we doubt not but our reader may be rendered desirous to read on for ever, as the great person just above mentioned, is supposed to have made some persons eat.”

Samuel Richardson, printer, revolutionised fiction. He inaugurated a method of novel-writing: shrewdly adapted, and developed, by Fielding; boisterously copied by Smollett; humorously varied by Goldsmith and Sterne. And when the new ideal of realism and simple narrative had been thus, more or less consciously, established as fit fruit for the circulating library: that “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,” finally purified of all offence against decency, was planted in every household by a timid and bashful young lady, who “hemmed and stitched from breakfast to dinner with scrupulous regularity.”

The mental development of Frances Burney, authoress of Evelina, was encouraged by “no governess, no teacher of any art or of any language.” Her father’s library contained only one novel; and she does not appear to have supplemented it in this particular. But the peculiar circumstances of Dr. Burney’s social position, and the infectious enthusiasm of his artistic temperament, provided his daughter with very exceptional opportunities for the study of material appropriate to the construction of a modern novel. On the one hand, he permitted her free intercourse “with those whom butlers and waiting-maids call vulgar”; and, on the other, he gave her every opportunity of watching Society at ease in the company of artists and men of letters. At his concerts and tea-parties, again, she often saw Johnson and Garrick; Bruce, Omai, and the “lions” of her generation; the peers and the politicians; the ambassadors and the travellers; the singers and the fiddlers.

And, finally, if her most worthy stepmother has been derided for the conventionality which discouraged the youthful “observer,” and dictated a “bonfire” for her early manuscripts, it may not be altogether fanciful to conjecture that the domestic ideals of feminine propriety thus inculcated had some hand in shaping the precise direction of the influence which Fanny was destined to exert upon the development of her art.

For if Evelina was modelled on the work of Richardson, and the fathers of fiction, who had so recently passed away, it nevertheless inaugurated a new departure--the expression of a feminine outlook on life. It was, frankly and obviously, written by a woman for women, though it captivated men of the highest intellect.

We need not suppose that Johnson’s pet “character-monger” set out with any intention of accomplishing this reform; but the woman’s view is so obvious on every page that we can scarcely credit the general assumption of “experienced” masculine authorship, which was certainly prevalent during the few weeks it remained anonymous. It would have been far more reasonable for the public to have accepted the legend of its being written by a girl of seventeen. For the heroine is represented as being no older; and though Miss Burney was twenty-six at the time, she has been most extraordinarily successful in assuming the tone of extreme youth, and thus emphasising still further the innovation. Its main subject is “The Introduction of a Young Lady to the World”; and being told in letters from the heroine to her guardian, could scarcely have been better arranged, by a self-conscious artist, for the exposition of the novelty. On the other hand, the success of its execution doubtless owes much to the author’s spontaneity and to her untrained mind. It would seem that she was blissfully unconscious of any accepted “rules” in composition; and even in Cecilia, generally supposed to be partially disfigured by Johnson’s advice, it is only in the structure of her sentences that she attempted to be “correct.” It is a more complex variant of the same theme, with a precisely similar inspiration: the manipulation of her own experience of life, and her own comments thereon.