Long touted as the first English novel, or at the least the first epistolary novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela has since had both those positions questioned in light of work by earlier writers, most notably Aphra Behn. It remains of extreme… Read More ›
As did most novels by George Gissing, The Odd Women focused on working-class poor in an uncaring society. The novel opens with six happy sisters, living with their widower physician father. He believes that women should not have to worry… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
The last of George Meredith’s novels, The Amazing Marriage resembles his previous works in its defense of women against men’s errors. In his fiction and real life, Meredith declared man to be in need of woman, who could educate and… Read More ›
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