Let's read The Victorian Art of Fiction, ed. Rohan Maitzen

This week’s text will be The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel, Broadview Press, 2009, ed. Rohan Maitzen.  We all know Rohan as the proprietor of Novel Readings, but here we have a book she edited, an anthology of twenty-two Victorian magazine essays on the English novel.  Rohan has supplied footnotes and deftly trimmed the essays.  I was never too curious about what was under those ellipses, which I take as a sign of good trimming.

The authors range from major novelists (Eliot, Trollope, James, Stevenson) to the scintillating A. Nonymous.  The dates cover 1848 to 1884.  The essays are diverse but not comprehensive.  A story emerges, a debate takes place.  Are novels good or bad?  Meaning, novels as a whole – should one waste any time reading novels – and specific novels.  Perhaps Charlotte Brontë is bad for you and George Eliot is good for you.  Not that this debate has entirely ended, but we know which side won.  The Victorian Art of Fiction helped me see the path of the argument.

If novels are immoral, or if reading them is immoral, it is likely because so many are written by ladies.  Or not.  So a subtheme of the book is The Lady Novelist, with George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) and Margaret Oliphant’s “Modern Novelists – Great and Small” (1855), and others, pursuing the idea.  Of course, the deck is stacked, with two not-so-silly lady novelists at the beginnings of their own careers surveying the field, thinking about not what lady novelists should do, but what Eliot and Oliphant should do.

In later essays, George Eliot becomes an exemplar for the seriousness of the novel as an art form, and as a morally useful form.  In the anthology, she becomes the foil for Charlotte Brontë, a writer who made critics nervous.  Are her books good or bad, helpful or harmful?  Emily Brontë is barely mentioned in these essays.  Charlotte is apparently a sufficiently difficult problem.  I’m going to write more about this theme, if for no other reason than to gape at Leslie Stephen’s baffling 1877 attempt on Brontë's books.

The essays often work in pairs.  They are chronological, so Rohan will have to tell us how that worked. George Eliot’s sly “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) is followed by W. R. Greg’s “False Morality of Lady Novelists” (1859), who at first sounds as bad as his title, but improves.  Anthony Trollope’s celebratory, even valedictory, “Novel-Reading” (1879) is followed by John Ruskin’s scathing, hilarious, utterly bonkers “Fiction – Fair and Foul” (1880), which functions in this anthology as the final scream of the “novels rot your brain” argument.  And we end with Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson civilly discussing what the novel can do (anything) and how, exactly, it can do it (now there’s the difficulty), two master craftsmen who could not take the novel more seriously.  They win.