The younger generation’s tendency to reject the predilections and perceived prejudices of the former—to spurn its greatest accomplishments in the search for something better—is well documented. We have only to look to Virginia Woolf for a classic and particularly strident repudiation of her feminist foremothers and literary predecessors among the Victorians. In a sharp critical dismissal of “Mrs. Gaskell,” to take one memorably acerbic example, Woolf admitted with characteristically breezy understatement to “a kind of irritation with the methods of mid-Victorian novelists” (341). As the voice of the younger generation’s spare, modernist aesthetic, Woolf disdains both Gaskell’s narrative technique—citing its tendency towards “prettiness” over substance—and Gaskell’s easy knack for storytelling rendered flat by a troubling lack of wit: “[w]hat we want to be there is the brain and the view of life; the autumnal woods, the history of the whale fishery, and the decline of stage coaching we omit entirely” (343). In Woolf’s estimation, and in her efforts to theorize an aesthetically sound novel, Gaskell’s talent for exposition is deemed tedious; superfluous; and, above all, illustrative of the narrative excesses and philosophical vacuity of the previous generation. Nearly fifty years earlier, in an anonymous 1856 Westminster Review article, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Marian Evans mocked the formulaic and morally lax efforts of the bulk of women novelists writing at mid-century, classing them alongside the usual proliferation of “unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry” (Eliot, “Essays” 162). Where Woolf, her successor, calls for greater economy of style, Evans before her wanted the crop of amateur female novelists dominating the 1850s English literary marketplace to cease being uninspired amateurs and to hone instead their peculiarly feminine powers of “genuine observation, humour, and passion,” all prerequisites for the morally serious fiction “George Eliot” would begin to make famous with the publication of Adam Bede in 1859 (Eliot, “Essays” 162). Needing to align her novels with ponderous philosophical and moral reflection meant that, at least early on in her novelist’s career, Evans refused to compromise her literary vision, strictly adhering to a sobering realism that revealed ordinary people—clergymen, alcoholics, fallen women, and profligate aristocrats—at their worst, in their darkest and most desperate moments, their lack of religious faith and hypocrisy made visible by her keen powers of observation. With the rapid production first of Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede, Evans bucked the popular trend for serialized fiction-light satirized in “Silly Novels,” developing instead the unflinching realism so readily associated with George Eliot’s mature style (Hughes 249–285). Responding to his reported early criticisms of “Janet’s Repentance,” she responded in a letter of June 11, 1857 to her always cautious publisher John Blackwood—a sympathetic reader almost too gentlemanly for his own good:

Once again signaling her distance from the implausible melodramas churned out in droves by the presumably leisured “Lady Novelists,” Marian Evans lays claim to the rigors of her new vision for Victorian fiction—to the daring combination of scientific observation and moral complexity that quickly brought her lasting fame and an exalted place among the great nineteenth-century realists. Two important prototypes for the moral seriousness endorsed in George Eliot’s mature novels are, perhaps surprisingly, the polemical writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, two important and complex influences underemphasized in critical accounts portraying Eliot as a solidly mid-Victorian anti-feminist who, for all intents and purposes, eschewed the romantic political tendencies of her predecessors.¹ Marian Evans’s less frequently discussed fascination with and attempt to weigh in—however cautiously—on the vexed literary legacy of Wollstonecraft and Fuller at midcentury deserves a prominent place among the stories we choose to tell about the novelist and reluctant commentator on the “Woman Question.” As it so happened, and as this essay will demonstrate, Evans’s eager and deliberate nod to Wollstonecraft and Fuller’s philosophical nonfiction prose in her early journalism from the 1850s represents a decisive turning point in the construction of an authoritative critical voice to call her own.

What is the exact nature of Evans’s relationship to her romantic predecessors Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft? Is it as acrimonious as Woolf’s view of the “mid-Victorian novelists,” and why is this particular chapter of feminist literary history worth telling? Further, how should we begin to explain Marian Evans’s fascination with the past achievements of celebrated literary women, as in evidence in her 1850s journalism? I argue that a reconsideration of Evans’s 1850s journalism focuses attention on her dialogically-charged critical voice, cultivated in highly self-conscious imitation of her bolder romantic predecessors, as she worked to cultivate a literary persona captivating and authoritative enough to counter the pernicious influence of the “Lady Novelists” on the Victorian reading public, pointing to the moral dangers inherent in wildly improbable fictions. Moreover, Eliot’s journalist’s voice highlights as well her signature championing of women’s innate moral benevolence, over and above the accommodation of their intellectual presence in the public sphere. Her early journalism thus warrants critical attention on its own terms, in light of its formal complexity, as illustrative of what Fionnuala Dillane calls the “fluency with which … [she] shapes her material to suit its context, and for the carefully constructed appeal of her public personae” (9). Finally, I contend that a reassessment of Eliot’s analysis of her predecessors—and her analysis of historically situated women’s roles and women’s learning more broadly—provides a useful interpretive frame with which to reread attenuated female subjectivity as depicted in Middlemarch, with its famous redirecting of Dorothea Brooke’s “noble” energies and public-spiritedness toward domestic duty as the wife of an MP (Eliot, Middlemarch 784).

Enamored of the “Lady Novelists,” the Victorian reading public had, by the 1850s, long forgotten, or deliberately downplayed, the intellectual strain in English women’s writing signaled retrospectively by the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Indeed, the Victorian periodical press’s tendency to dismiss Wollstonecraft’s philosophical arguments in defense of women’s untapped intellectual capabilities as a coarse, indecorous quirk of intellectual history is a “vague prejudice” alluded to cautiously by Marian Evans in her 1855 Leader review of “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft.” The publication history of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) alone suggests that it was not the instant and widely celebrated feminist classic revered by twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. Originally produced in pamphlet form, the manifesto did not reach a wide readership from the outset nor was it reprinted for the benefit of a radical urban readership, as the works of Godwin, Paine, Byron, and Shelley had been from the 1820s through the 1840s. From the late-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries A Vindication was easily subsumed by the dominant gender ideology of the period—its warnings against the subordination of women silenced by the heaps of conduct literature caricaturing female intellectuals as disheveled oddities (St. Clair 277–280).

Of course, the anti-Wollstonecraft tone of the romantic era conduct literature for women underscored by William St. Clair reminds us that Wollstonecraft’s works had been swiftly marginalized and misconstrued by a reactionary British reading public—repudiating political radicalism, the excesses of the French Revolution and French culture more generally—in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Caine 53–54). Thus, Mrs. Sandford’s 1830 Woman in her Social and Domestic Character features the unflattering portrait of the “disciple of Woolstonecraft [sic] … [throwing] off her hat, and … [calling] for a boot-jack; and … [imagining] that by affecting the manners of the other sex, she should best assert her equality with them” (qtd. in St. Clair 279). Sandford’s figure of the inelegant “female pedant” exploits the popular anti-radical backlash, reducing female intellectualism to an elaborate charade of dress-up and deception (qtd. in St. Clair 279).

Most damaging of all, the 1798 publication of Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman did little to rekindle public enthusiasm for Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of women’s rights, fixing critical attention instead on a prurient interest in Wollstonecraft’s private calamities at the expense of her public writings. Revealing salacious details concerning her tempestuous affair with Gilbert Imlay and numerous failed suicide attempts, the Memoirs instantly ignited a maelstrom of public censure and professed outrage, thus ironically undermining Godwin’s didactic intent to enshrine Wollstonecraft among “the illustrious dead” whose exemplary deeds and character “best deserve to be esteemed and loved” (43). A contemporary response to the Memoirs in the New Annual Register for 1798 captures the emerging popular view of Wollstonecraft—not as the original mind given its due in Marian Evans’s Leader review—as a bleak cautionary tale:

Seen in this context, reading and reviewing Wollstonecraft admiringly, as Marian Evans did in the anonymous 1855 Leader article, is no insignificant or likely feat, and perhaps only possible under the guise of comfortable anonymity, before the fashioning—and eventual unmasking—of “George Eliot” would subject her to intense public scrutiny. Nevertheless, the Leader review elegantly courts and counters the mainstream vitriol directed at Wollstonecraft, while pointing to Evans’s indirect attempt to align her early journalistic forays in literary criticism with the rationalism of her scandalous foremother, and the “vigorous and cultivated understanding” of the American romantic Margaret Fuller (Eliot, “Essays” 332). The cautious and contradictory notes sounded in Evans’s journalism as a whole, and the conservative bent of her subsequent fiction notwithstanding, it is worth reconsidering the efforts of the Victorian writer to appropriate and temper the analytical strategies of her predecessors, without emulating Wollstonecraft’s strident tone or Fuller’s rhapsodic pronouncements and without appearing to endorse either’s radical arguments in favor of sex equality.

As she published review after review anonymously in The Westminster Review and the Leader throughout the 1850s, Marian Evans endorsed certain historical models of flourishing female intellectual culture, as she began to sort out privately whether or not such a trajectory would even be possible for her. Margaret Fuller’s tragically premature death by shipwreck in 1850 struck a nerve. As she remarked in a letter of March 27, 1852 to Mrs. Peter Taylor:

Why is Fuller’s short life seen here as a cause for optimism and gratitude and not despair? In search of a critical and authoritative voice to drown out those of the anti-intellectual “Lady Novelists,” Fuller’s brilliant, though brief career suggests an immensely appealing critical voice for Evans to latch onto and refashion along more moderate lines, as she explored the state of the “Woman Question” at midcentury, from the strategic vantage point of the anonymous reviewer.

Anonymity also proved a productive position from which to advance controversial—somewhat tenuous—claims regarding the particular circumstances that enabled historically-situated women to thrive intellectually, as arbiters of taste and literary culture. While living in Weimar in 1854 with the still-married George Henry Lewes, Evans wrote a piece for the Westminster Review purportedly reviewing a recent book on Madame de Sablé (Hughes 224). What she did instead is defend the gendering of literary production and the contributions of seventeenth-century French women above all in a remarkable essay titled “Woman in France: Madame de Sablé”:

Evan’s recent biographer, Kathryn Hughes, interprets the essay as evidence of an ambitious Evans resurfacing after a long hiatus in Germany, where she had been content to live for a short time in Lewes’s celebrity shadow. Well-known in Continental Europe, he was regarded as a vulgar hack and carefree ladies’ man by Evans’s close friends and members of the Victorian literary establishment back home in England (Hughes 224). Most importantly, the essay reveals Evans’s burgeoning interest in the work of her distinguished predecessors and may reflect an effort to tie the anomalous brilliance (in Evans’s version of literary history) of Wollstonecraft and Fuller on the Anglo-American literary scene to the French influences that shaped their lively and prophetic output, both directly and indirectly. Fuller, as Gary Williams has shown, commented extensively on the influence of George Sand’s novels on the formation of her own distinctive voice—a voice that captures, in Williams’s words, “the perspective of both genders,” thereby surpassing Sand’s predominantly masculine commitment to intellectual rigor at the expense of feminine perspicacity (114).

How did Evans in turn negotiate these same tensions between masculine precision and refined feminine feeling? The Madame de Sablé essay furnishes a number of interesting clues to this literary riddle. Whether or not the essay in fact constitutes a meditation on her Anglo-American predecessors, and an attempt to work out the nature of her own nascent contribution to English literature in response to their legacy, can never be known for certain. What we do know is that anxiety as to the nature of her own vocation wrecked her health periodically during the spring of 1854 as she settled into exile on the Continent with Lewes. Explaining a sudden illness to Cara Bray in a letter of May 19, 1854, she writes: “My troubles are purely psychical—self-dissatisfaction and despair of achieving anything worth the doing” (Eliot, “Letters” 133). Thus, exploring the precise nature of the success of seventeenth-century French women in attaining literary celebrity would seem a logical place to start in the lifelong quest to define her gendered contribution to belles lettres, and, in so doing, cast her journalist’s voice in dialogical relation to the coterie culture that produced and was, in turn, produced by women like Madame de Sablé, Madame de Sévigné, and Madame Roland, “great names, which … soar like tall pines amidst a forest of less conspicuous, but not less fascinating, female writers” (Eliot, “Essays” 9). As Jenny Uglow maintains, the 1850s journalism positions Evans “sorting out precisely what it meant to be a woman in the mid-nineteenth century, and particularly what the implications were for a woman like herself, an intellectual, a professional writer, a potential novelist” (85–86).

The historical forces and ideology at work in Evans’s own day, with their insistence on the virtue of gendered separate spheres, did not appear particularly auspicious for the flourishing of an authentic female literary culture. In the “Madame de Sablé” essay, Evans advances the far-fetched claim that the relatively “small brain and vivacious temperament” of French women help to explain their achievement in letters where “intense and rapid rather than comprehensive” powers of execution serve a writer better than a more philosophical and contemplative frame of mind, powers linked in the essay to “the larger brain and slower temperament of the English and the Germans” (Eliot, “Essays” 10). Evans’s exhaustive survey of not only the physiological characteristics but also the peculiar socio-historical conditions that permitted Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Staël to become distinguished patrons of the arts are invoked in stark contrast to the rigid formality and exclusivity of the Victorian literary establishment, thus involving reader and critic in turn in an elaborate game of historical translation. The portrait of the coterie-salon world dominated by women reminds us that Evans the critic wielded her journalist’s pen under a radically different set of conditions, in a less forgiving print culture dominated by male publishers, authors, and critics: Blackwood’s world of the profit motive.

Though the “Madame de Sablé” essay should not be read as licensing extramarital liaisons of the Evans-Lewes variety—it upholds conventional morality in much the same way that George Eliot’s mature novels do—it does highlight the advantages for intellectual women of a more permissive society, one not rigidly demarcated according to the Victorian ideology of gendered, separate spheres. Evans’s momentous decision to court severe censure and gamble her future happiness on the oddball Lewes no doubt inspired the following passage from the “Madame de Sablé” essay:

The mixed company of the literary salon involves women freely choosing intellectually stimulating male partners, Evans writes. Though stale and arranged domestic partnerships might not work against a fully-formed and mature female artist, conventional marriage is bound to stymie the female intellectual in search of a wider sphere of influence and inspiration, a woman like Evans before the appearance of “George Eliot.” Evans’s championing of the French salon as a privileged moment in female intellectual history is invoked strategically, as if to say: “Look at the set of fruitful conditions I have NOT inherited! And what shall I do instead, under circumstances less conducive—if not downright hostile—to the cultivation of an authoritative feminine voice for English literature?”

The 1855 Leader review of “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” is Evans’s attempt to locate and endorse a compelling and intellectually rigorous feminine voice for English literature. The succinct format and analytical focus of the essay makes it more than a simple review, but rather a significant attempt to adapt the legacy of Fuller and Wollstonecraft for the Victorian reading public, while introducing a milder, though equally authoritative voice to the public: the voice of Evans, the morally-serious reader-critic. The essay begins by citing “the dearth of new books” as a fitting justification for a critical exploration of two carefully chosen older titles, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), effectively introducing a mini-canon in recent feminist philosophy (Eliot, “Essays” 331). Applauding the “strong understanding [that] is present in both,” Evans makes a number of important distinctions between the two works:

Here are the prophetic pronouncements of Fuller and the political railings of Wollstonecraft, translated and transmuted into domestic virtues for the benefit of Evans’s Victorian readership. Making these women palatable for her readership entails softening their edges for an extended reflection on their words, over and above the various private disappointments that account in large measure for Wollstonecraft’s vituperative, coarser tones, and, in the final analysis, help to explain Evans’s retrospective assertion that Fuller’s life could be “sweet” only as a result of her untimely death (Eliot, “Letters” 92). Attention to the words of her predecessors as they mingle with her own makes it clear that the feminine voice for a new era glimpsed here makes two (among many others) distinctive contributions to women’s literary culture. First, Evans dispenses with Fuller’s “dreamy vagueness” to make a series of critical judgments grounded in her extensive reading, thus supplying the “erudition” undermined by the inelegant stylistic tendencies of Fuller and Wollstonecraft. Second, the knowing reviewer suggests that the insights on women’s social position, education, and a female literary tradition articulated in Woman in the Nineteenth Century and A Vindication should be resuscitated and brought to bear fruitfully on the present state of affairs, just as the reviewer begins to do here, in this short plea for greater “freedom and culture for women” (Eliot, “Essays” 337).

If the “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” review, on the one hand, argues for an expanded role and a more authoritative presence for women in the cultural realm, then a novel like Middlemarch, on the other hand, appears to contradict this earlier public message, ending famously with the redirecting of Dorothea’s philanthropic ambitions toward “not widely visible” domestic virtues (Middlemarch 785). Even if the journalism does not perfectly fit the contours of the novel, furnishing an easy key for decoding its multilayered moral valences, the 1850s essays pondering the historical shape of women’s literary culture—and the frantic search for a dialogical-critical voice—resonate significantly with the fully-formed novelist’s study of provincial life. Above all, Middlemarch’s commentary on gender shows us the extent to which Eliot had, by the 1870s, both internalized and parted ways definitively with the visionary feminist maxims of Wollstonecraft and Fuller. To this end, the novel alerts successive generations of readers to Evans’s mature attitudes toward thwarted and distorted feminine personality types; to her implied contract with women readers as those most keenly interested in the limited, yet essential reach of an ordinary life; and to her implied assertion that women writers remain the chief purveyors of this kind of philosophical-domestic realism.

In a letter to Blackwood of July 24, 1871, Evans explains the ever-widening scope of Middlemarch as the only possible course of action under the circumstances:

Broadly, the novel’s interest in the deformation of the feminine personality under the influence of determining historical forces and a particular sort of class-bound social conditioning takes as its focal point a less frequented garden walk: the private grievances and thwarted ambition of a set of provincial women, including Dorothea Brooke and her sister Celia, the future Lady Chettam, and the pretty Rosamund Vincy, who becomes the unhappily married “Mrs. Lydgate.” The novelist’s purported aim, to chart out new territory for literary realism, is enhanced immeasurably by her psychological treatment of a leprous feminine malaise, partly the result of an inadequate system of female education and partly owing to familial overindulgence, which amounts in the novel to a form of neglect, with infantilizing tendencies and dangerous social repercussions. The theme is not a new one, of course, though it may have seemed daring to Victorian readers, in much the same way that the Greek tragedy of Maggie Tulliver signaled a new victory for an emotionally-stirring brand of realism when The Mill on the Floss first appeared in serialized form in 1860. But the theme of women’s lives tragically forestalled by the narrowness of their surroundings is taken straight from the pages of Wollstonecraft’s bitter 1792 diatribe. By dramatizing the private fortunes and losses of the Brooke sisters and Rosamund Vincy, “George Eliot” breathes imaginative life into the keynote of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication. Set against the backdrop of Wollstonecraft’s complex legacy, Middlemarch explores the disastrous consequences of a superficial education, pettiness, and envy at the level of domestic tragedy (Rosamund Vincy and Dr. Lydgate) and also invites us to consider the unanticipated felicity of domestic retirement for a mature woman accustomed to suffering and experienced with loss (Dorothea Brooke by the end of the novel).

We also know that in 1871, while still immersed in the initial planning of “Miss Brooke,” the novel that would become Middlemarch, the specter of Wollstonecraft’s career began to preoccupy Evans, as her own failing health took a turn for the worse, curtailing her productivity and making her especially vulnerable to a series of dark moods. A letter of July 7, 1871, inquiring as to the health of the Rabbi Emanuel Deutsch, derives a hopeful lesson from one memorable incident in Wollstonecraft’s life: her famous suicide attempt by drowning in the Thames after the final rupture with her American paramour Gilbert Imlay. Evans confides in the Rabbi Deutsch:

Interpreting Wollstonecraft’s failed suicide attempt as a “parable,” with serious implications for women writers and women readers, Evans resists the tendency among romantic and Victorian readers and critics to blacken Wollstonecraft’s name (Eliot, “Letters” 389–390). This resolutely optimistic rereading of Wollstonecraft’s career cloaks the second chapter in a short life in pointedly moral garb, layered in “real joys,” a phrase readily suggestive of the fulfilling intellectual work, enduring friendships, and true intimacy that Evans cherished in her personal life, and conferred as rewards upon the more reflective and altruistic among her fictional characters.

That the construction of a cluster of oddly interdependent, stymied female characters in Middlemarch, and elsewhere in her fiction, constitutes Evans’s attempt to recast the scandalous life of Mary Wollstonecraft and the lessons derived from her feminist philosophy in terms of the rhetoric of Victorian morality—as a parable for Victorian women writers and readers—suggests a fruitful interpretive frame for probing the novel’s engagement with gender and women’s literary history. The portrait of Rosamond Vincy is thus best seen as a revision on a Wollstonecraftian theme, a study in what it means for an intelligent and ambitious man (Dr. Lydgate) to marry a woman who is, in the main, “beautiful, innocent, and silly” (Wollstonecraft 95). The narrator of Middlemarch predicts Lydgate’s demise at the hands of this elegant, attractive creature in terms that deliberately echo Wollstonecraft’s earlier commentary on the social and domestic implications of women’s education, “[f]or Rosamond never showed any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date” (Eliot, Middlemarch 252). The fact that lying comes easily to Rosamond is another disturbing facet of her character, underscored and ironically glossed over by the narrator as evidence of another one of her “elegant accomplishments, intended to please” (Eliot, Middlemarch 252).

The description of Rosamond Vincy as “a rare compound of beauty, cleverness, and amiability,” and the suffering subsequently visited on her ambitious husband as he navigates the treacherous waters of the Victorian medical profession with little help or sympathy from his wife, is a domestic tragedy, which A Vindication predicts in no uncertain terms (Eliot, Middlemarch 252). Applying the logic of A Vindication to the Victorian novel, Rosamond Vincy, it becomes clear, exhibits the very same leprous frailty peculiar to all “civilized women… [systematically] weakened by false refinement,” a moral blindness linked in Middlemarch to Lydgate’s downfall (Wollstonecraft 65). Wollstonecraft’s warnings about the complete warping of the feminine mind from birth as the result of routine exposure to sentimental culture of the most superficial variety acquires a haunting resonance when considered alongside Dr. Lydgate’s unfortunate marriage:

Throughout A Vindication, then, Wollstonecraft exposes and excoriates what amounts to little more than an educational ruse—a sham education in the “decorative” and pleasing arts—designed to overstimulate women’s nerves at the expense of their intellects. Carefully repudiating Rousseau’s controversial theories on women’s education as put forth in Émile (1762), A Vindication constitutes a sustained and spirited assault on the fashionable eighteenth-century conceit that “beauty [above all] is woman’s sceptre” (Wollstonecraft 48).

While Middlemarch continues Wollstonecraft’s critique of an education in accomplishments that infantilizes and paralyzes women and who, as a consequence, become tyrants of the domestic sphere, in Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Evans must have found something akin to a spiritual meditation on the repercussions of a hastily-contrived marriage based on physical passion alone. Middlemarch, after all, employs the language of spiritual affliction to make Lydgate’s suffering, following the unraveling of his marriage as a result of his mounting personal debts, pointedly analogous to the psychological torment to which the banker Bulstrode succumbs near the end of the novel, when Raffles threatens to expose his past nefarious connections. Thus, even once Lydgate’s debts have been discharged fully, Dorothea is shocked by his gravely altered countenance, exhibiting by this point in the novel “not the change of emaciation, but that effect which even young faces will very soon show from the persistence of resentment and despondency” (Eliot, Middlemarch 716). Lydgate’s tragic despondency—his premature aging and state of near-constant anxiety—reflects, in terms of the spiritual logic of Fuller’s Woman, the failure of civilized “Man” (and “civilized Europe” more broadly) to regard marriage as a “meeting of souls” rather than a mere social contract “of convenience and utility” (41).

In Woman, Fuller reiterates Wollstonecraft’s earlier vituperative pronouncements, while couching her predictions in an inclusive religious rhetoric that posits “Man” and “Woman” as twin souls whose union must, thus robustly reconsidered, involve “a religious recognition of equality,” if there is to be any hope for the longevity and flourishing of the institution of marriage (42). Significantly, and for the purposes of the feminist genealogy considered briefly in this essay, it is Wollstonecraft and her biographer-husband, the philosopher William Godwin, who are singled out in a series of rhapsodic passages in Woman as memorably exemplifying Fuller’s ideal of “a marriage of friendship” enlivened by “esteem” (Fuller 43). Indeed, with Woman, Fuller writes a prototype of feminist history, championing Wollstonecraft and her faithful husband in a glowing, undivided language that firmly places the radical couple on the right side of history, positioned here as the right kind of “outlaws”—outlaws brokering a daring “new interpretation of woman’s rights” (44), while courting and even embracing the world’s censure. And unlike Evans in the 1850s, moreover, Fuller cared not a fig for Victorian notions of propriety, reclaiming Godwin as the most unlikely—but all the more virtuous—of romantic heroes:

In cultivating the voice of the discerning female prophet, removed from the spiritual poverty that surrounds her, Fuller, in the earlier decades of the century, refined a humanistic rhetoric that would amply suit Evans’s moral vision for the realist novel as it came magnificently to fruition by midcentury. In a letter of May 8, 1869 to Harriet Beecher Stowe that we would do well to link to Evans’s theory of the novel, the nonbeliever Evans maintains that:

The novel, in other words, and as commentators have long noted, is tasked in a secular age with disseminating a “practical religion” predicated on the knowledge of “what is good for mankind” and an innate aversion to “what is evil for mankind” (Eliot, “Letters” 361).

By the end of Middlemarch, it is Dorothea Brooke who exemplifies Wollstonecraft’s ideal of “a rational creature useful to others, and content with … [her] own station,” her second and long-delayed marriage to the energetic Will Ladislaw roundly answering Wollstonecraft’s call for a rationally-based partnership among equals to replace women’s “train[ing] up to obedience” under the terms of conventional bourgeois marriage (Wollstonecraft 52). Dorothea’s second marriage therefore corresponds—however imperfectly—to Fuller’s notion of marriage as a “meeting of souls” predicated on the recognition of “Woman” as an equal endowed with “the rights of an immortal being” (Fuller 41). That Dorothea’s quiet fate constitutes a breach with her romantic feminist predecessors, Wollstonecraft and Fuller, has less to do with their pervasive presence in her fiction than with Evans’s own internal contradictions: her refusal to define in concrete and measurable terms a role for women in the public sphere that would adequately suit her expansive moral philosophy. And yet in the final passages of Middlemarch, as the narrator reflects at length on Dorothea’s disappointingly ordinary trajectory, this meditation on the heroine’s faults and misapprehensions makes her less of a paragon and—more appropriately for Evans, writing both for and against her foremothers—another version of Wollstonecraft and Fuller: ardent spirits radically determined by a habituation to loss and by the numerous personal tragedies that make up the fabric of a woman’s life.

Notes

Works Cited