Author Archives
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Analysis of George Moore’s Evelyn Innes
George Moore’s melodramatic romance novel Evelyn Innes is replete with characters based on real people. The author fashioned Evelyn’s father after the French-born musician Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), who studied Renaissance music and the instruments that produced it in London. A… Read More ›
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Analysis of Fanny Burney’s Evelina
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds
The third in his sequence of Palliser novels, The Eustace Diamonds represents one of Anthony Trollope’s darkest tales. He departs from his gently ironic presentations of everyday human relationships with their small but important emotional battles. This novel focuses on… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram
An example of Newgate fiction, in which writers based novels on true criminal accounts, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram established him as the most popular novelist of England during the same year Sir Walter Scott, to whom Bulwer-Lytton dedicated the book’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Moore’s Esther Waters
George Moore’s novel Esther Waters proved his most successful work. The novel’s realistic portrayal of the hardships of a servant girl departed from the oversentimentality by which much Victorian fiction, and some of Moore’s earlier works, were marked. According to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon took its place in an honored tradition as satire against what Butler perceived as the intellectual, emotional, and moral stagnation of English society and human nature in general. Revolting against the Victorian values that negatively affected English… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline
Like all Charlotte Smith’s novels, her first, Emmeline, contained strong autobiographical elements. Through fiction, Smith found a way to protest her situation as mother to a large brood of children with a profligate husband who had abandoned the family. According… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Meredith’s The Egoist
George Meredith indulged himself with a comedic presentation in his 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. It allowed him to engage in his favored approach of satirizing bourgeois stupidity. In doing so, he satirized himself. He felt he… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne
East Lynne represents prototypical 19th-century sensation fiction, extremely popular with English readers. The novel was the second for Mrs. Henry (Ellen Price) Wood, who had begun publishing highly moralistic fiction at the age of 41. It became an immediate hit… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Bram Stoker followed the lead set by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to write horror fiction. Such stories were enjoying a renewed prestige among the French, and Stevenson proved that modern… Read More ›
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Domestic Realism
A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccupation of the Romantic writers (1789–1837) with the superiority of intuition… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens’s seventh novel, first published in 20 serial parts between October 1846 and April 1848 with the complete title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Retail, Wholesale, and for Exploration, marked what many critics agree to be… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne
Anthony Trollope produced the best-selling novel of its time in this, the third book in his Barsetshire sequence, Doctor Thorne, published in three volumes. He departed from his normal village setting in this novel to consider county characters, focusing on… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mary Brunton’s Discipline
Like her first novel, Self Control (1810), Mary Brunton’s second novel, Discipline, remains most important for its contribution to the development of silver-fork fiction and the manners novel, later made most famous by Jane Austen. Didactic in nature, the novel… Read More ›
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Didactic Literature
Didactic literature, from the Greek didaktikos, or skillful in teaching, refers to literature that overtly demonstrates a truth or offers a lesson to readers. Not a subtle approach, didacticism delivers a specific and pointed message and was present in the… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Meredith Diana of the Crossways
When George Meredith published his 1885 novel, Diana of the Crossways, women readers welcomed his heroine as representative of recent social reforms. The novel reflects its era’s obsessive interest in the breakdown of standards, which had been part of a… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism
Reflective of his general focus on hard work as an anecdote to failure and poverty, George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism blasts socialism as an ideal never to be realized, due to the greed of its leaders. He… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield
In his novel David Copperfield, Charles Dickens produced his own favorite work and the favorite of many of his readers. He had honed his style through previous novels, and David Copperfield reflects his mature skill, partially accounting for the novel’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus
Mona Caird revealed her strong feminist leanings in all her writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Her 1894 novel, Daughters of Danaus, contained all the themes she stressed in her essays, including a need for female independence, both physical and emotional,… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
The last of George Eliot’s seven novels, published in eight parts between February and September 1876, Daniel Deronda has a double structure that follows two protagonists, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth, in their intertwined search for self-fulfillment. Eliot breaks new… Read More ›
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