Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

Role of women writers in the progress of English realism 
Women writers dominated the vast novel market in Victorian England. Yet from the 
hundreds of women novelists popularly and critically admired in the nineteenth century, 
twentieth-century critical conversations have revolved around the canonical few: George Eliot, 
Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and, more recently, Elizabeth Gaskell. Here I argue that Victorian 
women novelists’ inherently complicated and conflicted positions on the ‘‘woman question,’’ in 
conjunction with the evolving horizon of expectations toward what we now call feminism, are 
responsible for their non canonical status. By recognizing unconscious prejudices, we may now 
give renewed and sustained critical attention to neglected novels by Victorian women. 
We might expect Victorian novels by women to benefit from the interest of feminist 
critics in the Victorian period in general and Victorian women in particular. Studies by critics 
such as Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey have provided important perspectives on 
conventionally acclaimed women novelists such as the Brontes. Never the less when one ponders 
the ambivalence and the relative scarcity of contemporary writing on no no canonical Victorian 
novels by women, it becomes evident that the ideological agendas of twentieth-century feminism 
are incompatible with the unstable, fluid, and fundamentally different positions of Victorian 
women writers on the woman question. Very often, the heroines of these popular novels, created 
against the backdrop of shifting nineteenth-century debates about the woman question, 
stubbornly resist appropriation by twentieth-century critics as subversive role models for women. 
While feminist criticism makes it possible in principle to recover forgotten women novelists, its 
ideological basis has limitations: what, for example, do you say about a conservative woman 
novelist like Charlotte Yonge once you’ve discovered her? 
In the classic work on Victorian woman writers, A Literature of Their Own, Elaine 
Showalter argues that women’s literary history has been deprived of the enormously diverse 
range of Victorian women novelists because of the traditional insistence upon the greatness of 
the elite few. 
Before Showalter’s reassessment, no canonical Victorian women writers were largely 
ignored. More surprisingly, however, feminist critics have since continued to overlook or 
examine cursorily the work of most Victorian women novelists. In the last few years, a small 
number of books have emerged that begin to address no canonical Victorian women writers in 
more depth. However, none provides an overview of the spectrum from conservative to radical 
women novelists, and no studies focus on how the novelists’ positions on feminism have in turn 
influenced critical attention. While no work yet exists that focuses on both conservative and 

---

85 
radical Victorian women novelists, critics have recently begun to write a few studies or 
biographies of individual women writers; occasionally, criticism directs attention to women 
writers as a group. І Most of the (still relatively few) studies that exist look at New Woman or 
sensation novels, those genres most apparently compatible with feminist readings, thus revealing 
how our own ‘‘woman questions’’ shape current interpretation and evaluation. In addition, New 
Woman and sensation novelists, whilst they have received the most critical attention, are still 
inadequately represented in literary studies. 
Given the prominence of discourse and discord on the woman question in Victorian 
England, Victorian women novelists were centrally concerned with the developing debates over 
women’s proper role and status in society. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century 
there was passionate discussion and agitation on matters such as marriage and divorce laws, 
women’s property and custody rights, and educational and employment opportunities for 
women, as well as a vocal debate on female suffrage, which gained intensity later in the century.
In fact, the complexity and multifariousness of the debates about women’s nature, role, 
and literary status, in Victorian and twentieth-century discussions, make it more appropriate to 
pluralize the term ‘‘woman question,’’ changing it to ‘‘woman questions. ’’Harriet Martineau, 
Geraldine Jewsbury, and Elizabeth Gaskell were among many who signed activist Barbara 
Bodichon’s petition to support the Married Woman’s Property Bill in 1854. Most women 
novelists, while stating their approval of single women’s financial independence, or the 
usefulness of education for women, made sure that they differentiated themselves clearly from 
the excesses of the ‘‘shrieking Sisterhood,’’ as Eliza Lynn Linton called them, or from the 
personal extremes and unconventionality of activists such as Mary Wollstonecraft.
Twentieth-century critics have tended to label women novelists as feminist or 
antifeminist, even classifying whole genres or subgenres according to their position on the 
woman question; a closer examination of Victorian novels demonstrates divisions and tensions 
concerning women that make such judgments simplistic. The lives and the fictions of Victorian 
women writers reveal endlessly contradictory perspectives on the woman question. All Victorian 
women novelists, whether we now label them radical or conservative, were fundamentally 
conflicted in their own beliefs about women’s proper role, and I believe that the critical reception 
of their novels from Victorian times to the present has been filtered through the ambivalence of 
the novelists themselves as well as their critics on the complex of issues which constitute the 
woman question. 
Novels by Victorian women writers tend to be melting-pots of ideological conflict and 
exploration of attitudes toward women’s nature and role.
Victorian women writers, we need to examine trends and elements in both nineteenth- 
and twentieth-century criticism and culture. Some of the principal factors at work during the 
Victorian period which contributed to the eventual exclusion of women writers from the canon 
include the increasing distinctions being made between popular and serious novels, the view that 
works by women are subjective and biased, especially in terms of their position on the woman 
question, and the increasing use of George Eliot as a touchstone against which other women 
writers would be compared and found wanting. 
By the 1860s, with the phenomenal popularity of the novel, and its dominance by female 
writers and readers, a division began to emerge between popular and ‘‘serious’’ literature. The 
more popular a novel, the more appealing to a mass audience, the more suspect the quality of the 
work. Popular works by women dealing with issues concerning women and often addressed to 

---

86 
women were thus dangerously in line for the critical guillotine. W. L. Courtney’s The Feminine 
Note in Fiction, written in 1904, epitomizes many of the clichés about Victorian womenand their 
writing – that they are simply imitative, concerned with detail, and overly involved in their 
works emotionally – coming to the conclusion that ‘‘the novel as a work of art’’ is disappearing 
because of its dominance by women. He singles out for particular attack what he sees as the 
tendency of women novelists to be overly didactic and subjective, a criticism still used in recent 
discussions of Victorian women writers. 
Victorian women writers have increasingly attracted critical and popular attention, and 
this trend seems to be expanding. Novels by Victorian women are regularly being assigned in 
university courses on Victorian literature and Victorian women, and these women writers have 
recently been the topic of many lively conference presentations and scholarly discussions.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1816-1855) 
Charlotte Bronte (pseudonym Currer Bell) – a daughter of a clergyman, received her 
education at a charity school for daughters of impoverished clergymen. The school was a 
veritable prison. Charlotte gained first-hand knowledge of the king of training to which future 
governesses were subjected. Her education completed, Charlotte entered the employ of a wealthy 
family as a governess were she was treated in a most slighting manner.
Charlotte Bronte’s novel “Jane Eyre” (1847) brought her fame and placed her in the rank 
of the foremost English realistic writers. She was personally acquainted with Dickens and 
Thackeray and the latter greatly influenced her literary method. In 1849, Charlotte published 
“Shirley”, her second big novel which dealt with the life of workers at the time of Luddites. The 
author’s sympathies are with the toilers. However, Bronte’s realistic portrayal of the conflict 
between labor and capital is much weakened by her attempting to solve the problem in a 
conciliatory moralistic way.
Jane Eyre 
One of the central themes of the book is education. Bronte’s description of horrors of 
Lowood charity school is not inferior to Dickens’s strongest passages portraying educational 
institutions of England of that time. Another problem raised in the novel is the position of a 
woman in society. The heroine of the novel maintains that women should have equal rights with 
men.
ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865) 
Elizabeth Gaskell, a clergyman’s daughter, also married a clergyman. Her husband and 
she made a study of living and working conditions of textile workers in Manchester and her first 
novel “Mary Barton” (1848) contains a vivid picture of the industrial conflicts which prevailed at 
that time. It was severely criticized by reactionary critics as a book hostile to the employers 
while Dickens and other representatives of progressive literature supported the author. Her first 
novel “Mary Barton” was undoubtedly the best owing to its realistic treatment of the main facts 
of the social and political life of that period.
GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880) 
Mary Ann Evans, known under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was born in 
Warwickshire. She was a daughter of a land agent who gave up his business to take charge of an 
estate. Her childhood and youth were spent amidst rural scenes and picturesque village locality 
described in the “Mill on the Floss”.

---

87 
Compelled to leave school at the age of 17 because of her mother’s death Mary Evans 
took charge of all domestic affairs. But her active mind and strong emotional nature drove her on 
to study. She put in much reading and became proficient in music and in German, French and 
Italian languages. Eliot had been brought up under religious influences, but she early 
abandoned religious beliefs disavowed church tenets and became a free thinker. From 1844-
1855, Eliot translated into English Feherbach’s “The Essence of Christianity” and other 
philosophical works.
In 1851, she settled in London as an assistant editor of a progressive magazine “The 
Westminster Review”. In 1857, George Eliot wrote her first three stories for a magazine, which 
were later published in book form under heading “Scenes of Clerical Life”. Then followed three 
remarkable novels which made her famous: “Adam Bede” (1859), “The Mill on the Floss” 
(1860) and “Silas Marner” (1861). “Adam Bede” contains splendid realistic pictures of the 
English countryside at the turn of the 18th century. Eliot lovingly depicts the patriarchal relations 
unaffected by bourgeois civilization. Adam Bede, a village carpenter, is the central character of 
the novel. He is an upright man always ready to help the weak and the suffering. His character is 
contrasted to a flippant and selfish aristocrat of the place.
The book shows her democratic and progressive sympathetic treatment of common 
people. At the same time it is affected by the positive philosophy: according to Eliot, the moral 
principles of men are closely connected with religion, “the religion of the heart”.
“The Mill on the Floss” in its first chapters is largely autobiographical. Scenes of rural 
nature and the life of peasants form the background against which the author traces the fate and 
the development of a girl whose aspirations ran counter to the philistine narrow-mindedness and 
incomprehension of those surrounding her.
Questions 
1. 
What works by Charlotte Bronte do you know? 
2. 
What works Elisabeth Gaskell, do you know?. 
3. 
What works by George Eliot do you know?