Inhibitions on Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith

Abstract

BY THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY women dominated the field of novel writing in quantity and held their own with men in quality. Among the conditions which made this development possible, such as improved education for women and more mixed social gatherings, perhaps the most important was the emergence of a pattern for a feminine novel-a sort of novel that women were both qualified and encouraged to write. It had to be a male author, Samuel Richardson, who established the form within which women authors could congenially work, since women themselves had not yet acquired the confidence to try something new. Richardson's novels focus on internal experience, particularly in the minds of women. Though the limitations on women's lives kept them from rivaling men's presentation of the external world-a brawl in a tavern, a ship's sick bay during a battle, a learned dispute at a Visitation Dinner-they were quite as able to deal with feelings and private thoughts. Telling his stories entirely or primarily from a woman's point of view, Richardson necessarily made his heroine an independent entity, not one who exists merely in relationship to men; he expressed her way of seeing, so that he presented manners, morals, human relationships as they affect women. In contrast to Tobias Smollett, who apparently had no interest whatever in women's feelings, and Henry Fielding, who professed concern but in fact treated them without subtlety or perceptiveness, Richardson represented them in convincing detail, so that the reader had to understand and respect