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

Jane Eyre was published in 1847; and Adam Bede, in 1859. Both novels appeared under pseudonyms, and on both occasions critics were baffled by qualities in the novels that could not be simplistically defined as masculine or feminine. When the authors behind the pseudonyms were revealed to be women, critics were dismayed. The main difference between the two episodes was that Charlotte Brontë had been shocked, dismayed, and hurt to discover that her realism struck others as improper; George Eliot had seen what had happened to Charlotte Brontë, and was prepared.

Early critics of Jane Eyre were obsessed with discovering the sex of Currer Bell. "The whole reading-world of England was in a ferment to discover the unknown author.… Every little incident mentioned in the book was turned this way and that to answer, if possible, the much-vexed question of sex."⁴² Incidents included clothes, domestic details, and conversations. Harriet Martineau, for example, determined on the basis of chapter 16, in which Grace Poole sews curtain rings on Rochester's bed drapings, that the book "could have been written only by a woman or an upholsterer."⁴³ Circumstantial evidence aside, the presentation of female sexuality and human passion disturbed and amazed readers. If Currer Bell was a woman, they could not imagine what sort of woman she might be. Even while critics acknowledged the presence of genius, they felt stunned by its unconventionality. The Christian Remembrancer declared that it would be hard to find "a book more unfeminine, both in its excellencies and its defects … in the annals of female authorship." According to Lewes, "a more masculine book in the sense of vigour was never written."⁴⁴ Others, like the American E. P. Whipple, were "gallant enough to detect the hand of a gentleman" in composing the "profanity, brutality, and slang."⁴⁵ The relationship between Rochester and Jane, and Jane's admission of passion for her married employer, could not be accepted. Thus one sees over and over in the reviews words like "sensual," "gross," and "animal." Tom Winnifrith, who has written a comprehensive study of the reception of Jane Eyre, has the impression that the most hostile reviews were written by women.⁴⁶

The appearance of Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë while the novelist's fame was at its posthumous height convinced critics that Brontë could not have been guilty of immorality, and also provided them with some explanations for her knowledge of passion. The Saturday Review was happy to exonerate Charlotte and to blame her education in Brussels for the unfeminine sophistication of the novels:

Women regarded her novels with that sort of fluttering alarm which is always awakened in unpolluted breasts by the signs of a knowledge greater than their own. Men recognized the truthful touches which these novels contained, but wondered how they came to be there, for the general purity of their tone refuted the notion that they were the symptoms of depravity.… We cannot doubt that Miss Brontë derived an instruction which to a less noble, unstained and devotional mind might have been perilous, from her residence in a foreign school, her observation of foreign manners, and her analysis of the thoughts of foreigners.⁴⁷

The Quarterly Review looked closer to home, at the influence of Branwell, "thoroughly depraved himself, and tainting the thoughts of all within his sphere."⁴⁸ Many readers, including Charlotte Yonge, felt that Branwell's influence on his sisters had been dastardly, but they found it comfortably in accordance with their notions of male and female temperament.

George Eliot, as the editor of the Westminister Review and the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, had already offended conservative factions. As the mistress of Lewes, she had put herself outside the boundaries of Victorian respectability. Thus she risked more critical hostility by revealing herself than Charlotte Brontë did, as she, Lewes, and the publisher Blackwood were well aware. It was the example of Jane Eyre, however, that Lewes cited in explaining the pseudonym to Blackwood: "When Jane Eyre was finally known to be a woman's book, the tone [of criticism] noticeably changed."⁴⁹ Furor about the sex of the author characterized the publication of Adam Bede, as it had the publication of Eliot's first, less successful book, Scenes from Clerical Life. With a few distinguished exceptions, reviewers believed George Eliot to be a clerical gentleman. The Saturday Review later confessed, "to speak the simple truth, without affectation or politeness, it [Adam Bede] was thought to be too good for a woman's story."⁵⁰

Barbara Bodichon and Anne Mozley were among those who guessed the truth. Bodichon, a radical feminist, rejoiced in the authorship as a triumph for womanhood: "1. That a woman should write a wise and humorous book which should take a place by Thackeray. 2. That youthat you whom they spit at should do it!"⁵¹ Anne Mozley, the reviewer for Bentley's Quarterly Review, was certain that the book was a woman's in spite of its felicity, force, and freedom of expression because it was written by an outsider, an observer: "The knowledge of female nature is feminine, not only in its details, which might be borrowed from other eyes, but in its whole tone of feeling … the position of the writer towards every point in discussion is a woman's position, that is, from a stand of observation rather than more active participation." Her review went on to cite other evidence of female culture as proof that a woman had written the book: "the knowledge of female nature … the full close scrutiny of observation … acquaintance with form life in its minute particulars … the secure ground … in matters of domestic housewifery." Finally, Mozley triumphantly cited, "women are known dearly to love a 'well-directed moral.'"⁵² Mozley's analysis was shrewd and perceptive. The brilliant conjectures of the Westminster Review, however, were not; the editor, John Chapman, had learned the secret from Herbert Spencer. He nevertheless congratulated himself on his prescience when the pseudonym was revealed to the public in 1860.⁵³

Lewes hoped that the pseudonym had won the book a fair reading; to Barbara Bodichon he wrote: "They can't now unsay their admiration." But he was wrong. At least one journal went back for a second look. William Hepworth Dixon, the editor of the Athenaeum (who sometimes reviewed his own books under a pseudonym), wrote a vicious notice for the gossip column: "It is time to end this pother about the authorship of 'Adam Bede.' The writer is in no sense a great unknown; the tale, if bright in parts, and such as a clever woman with an observant eye and unschooled moral nature might have written, has no great quality of any kind."⁵⁴ With the appearance of The Mill on the Floss, criticism of George Eliot noticeably changed and cheapened; it placed her among the "modern female novelists" and judged her by the collective standards. The Saturday Review was "not sure that it is quite consistent with feminine delicacy to lay so much stress on the bodily feelings of the other sex."⁵⁵ The Quarterly went back to its sneers at female ignorance: "There are traces of knowledge which is not usual among women (although some of the classical quotations might at least have been more correctly printed)."⁵⁶

The Brontës, in their radical innocence, confronted all sexually biased criticism head-on. Charlotte constantly had to be restrained by her publishers from attacking critics in the prefaces to her books, and she frequently wrote directly to reviewers and journals in protest. She admonished the critic of the Economist: "To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment."⁵⁷ Anne Brontë prefaced the second edition of Wildfell Hall with a defiant declaration of equal literary rights: "I am satisfied that if the book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be." George Eliot stopped reading reviews of her books when criticism became personal; all were vetted by Lewes. However, one sees signs of self-censorship both in her shift after 1860 to less autobiographical fiction, and in her careful elimination of possible double entendres in proof.

George Eliot was virtually alone among feminine novelists in speculating about the psychological and moral impact of women's experience on the structure and content of the novel. She found most of the feminine literature of her day inept and derivative, and wondered "how women have the courage to write and publishers the spirit to buy at a high price the false and feeble representations of life and characters that most feminine novels give."⁵⁸ She considered some of the literature inauthentic, "an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire."⁵⁹ In "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," Eliot denounced the covert victories of feminine values, the fantasies of instant intellectual mastery and intuitive spiritual authority. She understood that the habits of the professional were at variance with the indoctrination of women, but, in literature, as in other activities, she wished women to substitute "the hard drudgery of real practice" for feminine fantasy and self-indulgence.⁶⁰ Eliot also believed, however, that women writers had a "precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience," a speciality that was grounded in the maternal emotions.⁶¹ Somehow, she thought, the maternal affections would lead to "distinctive forms and combinations" in the novel.⁶²

The feminine novelists did share the cultural values of Victorian middle-class women, and they clung to the traditional notion of femininity. They were not, however, simply ordinary women who happened to write books; they were different from the start. Lewes and Massey were partly correct that "happy wives and busy mothers" did not become writers, but they failed to understand that women with strong imaginative drives and achievement needs could not be content with domesticity. Even those women writers who began to work because they needed to earn money soon found themselves changed by the disciplines and rewards of the profession. They were not like "any happy common woman"; they were more organized, more businesslike, more assertive, more adventurous, more flexible, and more in control of their lives.

Being Victorian women, they were concerned about these changes in themselves. Geraldine Jewsbury worried about the psychological transformations of female professionalism both in her letters to Jane Carlyle and in her novels. In the latter, she put her own doubts, ludicrously exaggerated, into the mouths of libertines and rogues: "The intrinsic value of a woman's work out of her own sphere is nothing, and what are the qualities developed to make up for it?… The bloom and charm of her innocence is gone; she has gained a dogmatic, harsh, self-sufficing vanity, which she calls principle; she strides and stalks through life, neither one thing nor another."⁶³