Mrs. Gaskell died on the twelfth of November, 1865. Of the novelists who have been considered in this book only three survived her, Mrs. Bray, Mrs. S. C. Hall, and Harriet Martineau, but they added little to prose fiction after that date. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the number of books written by women continued to increase each year. Julia Kavanagh was the author of several novels, the first of whichThe Three Paths, was published in 1848; all her stories were written with high moral aim and delicacy of feeling.Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1850, is probably the most powerful novel ever written to plead the cause of oppressed humanity. Dinah Maria Muloch Craik kept up the interest in the domestic novel; her most popular book,John Halifax, Gentleman, has lost none of its charm for young women, even if it does not meet the requirements of a classic. Mrs. Henry Wood is still remembered as the author of the melodramaticEast Lynne, but her best stories are theJohnny Ludlow Papers, which deal with character alone; her popularity is attested by the fact that more than a million copies of her books have been issued. Charlotte Yonge's forgotten novels were classed among theChurch Stories, because they contain so much piety and devotion. Of a different type was Miss de la Ramée, who wrote under the name of Ouidà; she had fine gifts of word-painting, but a fondness for the questionable in conduct. Miss Braddon, the author ofLady Audley's Secret, excelled in complicated plots. Mrs. Oliphant has been a most versatile writer, and followed almost every style of prose fiction; her domestic stories are generally considered her best. Anne Thackeray, better known as Mrs. Ritchie, the daughter of the great novelist, has written several novels, all of which have a delightfully feminine touch. Miss Rhoda Broughton has entertained the reading public by love stories which hold the attention until the marriage takes place. But all these women fade into insignificance beside George Eliot, whose first story,The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, appeared inBlackwood's Magazinein 1857, and whose last novel,Daniel Deronda, was published nearly twenty years later, in 1876.
It seems strange that any reader of her books should have thought them the product of a man's brain, as was at first believed. For,notwithstanding her power in developing a plot, her breadth of view, and her mental grasp, her genius is essentially feminine. She excelled in analysis of character, in attention to details, in ethical teaching, and in artistic truthfulness, the qualities in which women have been pre-eminent. Only a woman's pen could have drawn such characters as Dinah Morris, Maggie Tulliver, and Dorothea Casaubon, or could have followed the minute and subtle influences under which the plot ofMiddlemarchis shaped. George Eliot has left a larger portrait gallery of women than any other novelist. Not only has she drawn different grades of society, but, what is perhaps a more difficult task, she has drawn the different grades of spiritual greatness and moral littleness. She brought the psychological novel to a degree of perfection which has never been surpassed.
Mrs. Oliphant has thus written of George Eliot's place in literature:
"Another question which has been constantly put to this age, and which is pushed with greater zeal every day, as to the position of women in literature and the height which it is in their power to attain, was solved by this remarkable woman, in a way most flattering to all who were and are fighting the question of equality between the two halves of mankind; for here was visibly a woman who was to bekept out by no barriers, who sat down quietly from the beginning of her career in the highest place, and, if she did not absolutely excel all her contemporaries in the revelation of the human mind and the creation of new human beings, at least was second to none in those distinguishing characteristics of genius."
We are too near the nineteenth century to decide as to the relative positions of its great novelists. At one time George Eliot was placed at the head of all writers of fiction, with Dickens and Thackeray as rivals for the second place. But she was dethroned by Thackeray, and there are signs that the final kingship will be given to Charles Dickens, unless Scott receives it instead.
Fashions in novels change at least every fifty years. Exciting plots and situations, strong emotional scenes, sharp contrasts, are not demanded by present readers, who also turn away with disgust from the saintly heroine and the irreclaimable villain. Of the many volumes of fiction written in the eighteenth century only two are in general circulation to-day,Robinson CrusoeandThe Vicar of Wakefield. But all those once popular novels, even if their very names are now forgotten, have done their work in shaping the thought and morals of their own and succeeding generations.