jpexg@mit-hermes.ARPA (John Purbrick) (05/26/85)
> George Eliot... wrote "Silas Marner" and other long boring novels. > jcpatilla Well, one person's long boring novel is another's classic, although you're right, she did have a high output of long boring classics. On protagonists: How about Bronte's (forgot which, sorry) "Shirley"? She was a lot of fun, and one of the first women in fiction whose concerns weren't either getting married or avoiding the Bad Baronet. (Anyone watching The Woman in White?) That novel established Shirley as a female name, BTW. In the late 19th century there was a cluster of "feminist novels" or at least of novels with credible, interesting women. The first was George Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways" (1885) and then came Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", George Gissing's "The Odd Women", George Moore's "Esther Waters" (a reaction to "Tess") and Hardy again with "Jude the Obscure", all before 1895. Interesting that they all appeared so close together--was it a forerunning trend of liberalism as the women's-suffrage movement built up strength, on both sides of the Atlantic? An extra plug for "The Odd Women". This gets my nomination as the best feminist novel ever, and certainly the best by a man. It has a plot that keeps up the tension right to the end, but it isn't tension as in "The Bostonians" where we wait to find out who gets to dominate someone; it's a question of pride and independence--a bit like "My Brilliant Career". An edition recently came out from the British publisher Virago Press (lovely name, no?) but it's not an easy book to find, unfortunately. It's a shame that the momentum of the 1890's trend petered out. I've tried to think of recent male authors who have given prominent roles to sympathetic women, and I can't think of any except in sci-fi. Women don't seem to have any trouble in writing about men, though, which shows what the men ought to be doing. Will any Iris Murdoch fans out there please identify themselves? John Purbrick jpexg@mit-hermes.ARPA {...decvax!genrad! ...allegra!mit-vax!} mit-eddie!mit-hermes!jpexg