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Updated: June 28, 2025
Neither starts in life with more than a moderate capital of good looks Jane Eyre with hardly that for it is the fashion now-a-days with novelists to give no encouragement to the insolence of mere beauty, but rather to prove to all whom it may concern how little a sensible woman requires to get on with in the world.
But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious criticism while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time the novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often; by digression and divagation still oftener.
The woman's admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be." The Romantic Love of the poets and novelists was of late birth; the savage and many civilisations knew it not, and philosophers explain that it could not be developed till Roman Law had developed the conception of Marriage as a Contract.
The cynical dishonesties and the brutal spoliations which have come to light in the realm of high finance and big business are the natural fruit of such a manner of life as many of our recent novelists have vividly portrayed. And the wanton extravagance of the House of Mirth would not exist if the majority of the people did not admire it.
Many other novelists betray a strong spirit of Freethought. It pervades all George Meredith's later writings, and is still more conspicuous in Mrs. Lynn Linton's "True History of Joshua Davidson" and her powerful "Under which Lord?" the hero-husband of that story being an Agnostic gentleman who founds a workmen's institute and delivers Freethought lectures in it.
The influence of the novella and of the Oriental tale produced nothing better. From other literary forms the makers of fiction freely derived sensational materials and technical hints. Without insisting too closely upon the connection between novel and play, we may well remember that nearly all the early novelists, Defoe excepted, were intimately associated with the theatre. Mrs. Behn, Mrs.
Nor did it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"
In 1900 he resigned this position to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to France to live, and began to write novels under the influence of the French and Russian realistic novelists. Bennett is the author of many works of uneven merit. Some of these were written merely to strike the popular taste and to sell.
I have, however, heard a woman of high intellectual distinction refer to the peculiar truth and beauty of this very passage. In one of his latest novels, Les Rencontres de M. de Bréot, Henri de Régnier, one of the most notable of recent French novelists, narrates an episode bearing on the matter before us.
With his keen insight into ethics and with his robust common sense, Huxley stated the principle which these novelists have failed to grasp. A man, he tells us, "may refuse to commit another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believed worse than he actually is," since this results in "a loss to the world of moral force which cannot be afforded."
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