I recently read George Eliot’s diatribe against the frothy, proxy, pious or pedantic feminine fatuity of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (Westminster Review 1856). The heroine, she writes, is usually an heiress…with a vicious baronet, an amiable duke and an irresistible young son of a marquess as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance…her eyes and her wit are both dazzling, her nose and her morals…free from any tendency to irregularity…she dances like a sylph and reads the Bible in the original tongues.
I have to confess the next in my series of late Victorian romances includes at least one amiable duke, but my heroine has the ability to read shorthand rather than Hebrew or Greek. On sharing the above quote with my daughter, she commented, “so why did she pretend to be a man?”
MuseItUp is publishing “The Adventures of Jane Waterford: Successful Single Woman” on 30th May 2014
I have to confess the next in my series of late Victorian romances includes at least one amiable duke, but my heroine has the ability to read shorthand rather than Hebrew or Greek. On sharing the above quote with my daughter, she commented, “so why did she pretend to be a man?”
MuseItUp is publishing “The Adventures of Jane Waterford: Successful Single Woman” on 30th May 2014
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