Abstract
Women novelists were often accused of being unable to draw a man successfully. Men had precisely the same difficulty with women; ‘Their good woman is a queer thing, half-angel, half-doll,’ Charlotte Brontë complained.1 R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869) embodies many male fantasies about women. It is fashionable for men and boys to despise them — ‘creatures of a lower order, only good enough to run errands for us, and to nurse boy-babies’. (Chapter 9) The novel is full of such remarks, often dragged in for no reason, for instance, ‘a horse (like a woman) lacks, and is better without, self-reliance’. (Chapter 3)
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Notes and References
Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (London, 1877), Vol. 2, p. 376.
Quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1857), Vol. 2, Ch. 10.
Trollope’s relationship with his mother is discussed in The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family, by Lucy Poate Stebbins and Richard Poate Stebbins (London, 1946).
Anthony Trollope, North America (London, 1862), Vol. 1, Ch. 18.
Anthony Trollope, Autobiography (London, 1883), Ch. 10.
In The Queen of Hearts (1859). See Robert Ashley, Wilkie Collins (London, 1952), p. 55.
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© 1984 Merryn Williams
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Williams, M. (1984). The Male Image of Women. In: Women in the English Novel, 1800–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08184-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08184-4_9
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