The Ministry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan

Conclusion

Critics, too, wondered if the women novelists had removed themselves so far from the sphere of the common woman that they had lost the power to describe it. Richard Simpson pointed out some of the obvious problems in a review of George Eliot:

Though she ought to be able to draw women in herself, for the simple reason that she is a woman, yet she may be too far separated from the ordinary life of her sex to be a good judge of its relations. The direct power and the celebrity of authorship may obscure and replace the indirect influence and calm happiness of domestic feminine life. For admiration and affection do not easily combine. Celebrity isolates the authoress, and closes her heart; it places her where experience of the ordinary relations of the sex is impossible, and where she is tempted to supply by theory what is lacking in experience. She gives us her view of woman's vocation, and paints things as they ought to be, not as they are. Women work more by influence than by force, by example than reasoning, by silence than speech; the authoress grasps at direct power through reasoning and speech. Having thus taken up the male position, the male ideal becomes hers,—the ideal of power,—which expressed by her feminine heart and intellect, means the supremacy of passion in the affairs of the world.⁶⁴

On the contrary, women novelists had authority to describe the lives of ordinary women, those powerless lives of influence, example, and silence, precisely because they had outgrown them. As critics like Simpson uneasily sensed, they were writing not only to develop direct personal power, but also to change the perceptions and aspirations of their female readers. The strong utilitarian thrust of feminine criticism—what good will this book do us?—was partly the spirit of the age, but it was also a part of the search for new heroines, new role-models, and new lives.