Q. D. Leavis and Major Women Novelists

Abstract

The idea of ‘the novel as dramatic poem’ also revolutionised Mrs Leavis’s approach, turning her from a theorist into a fully fledged critic of the novel. In the very next number of Scrutiny after that containing Leavis’s critique of Hard Times we find her distinguishing two traditions of the novel in the following terms:

While the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with few exceptions, were descended from Addison and Defoe, with some admixture of a debased stage comedy, there is quite another novel, created by Emily Brontë, Melville, Conrad, and Henry James, among others, which makes use of the technique of the dramatic poem…. To recognize in James’s novels and nouvelles art of the same nature as Measure for Measure, to see that they are in a tradition of mediaeval and Elizabethan drama transmitted through Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Bunyan (and so Hawthorne), is to make their meaning accessible, as it never can be if they are approached on the assumption that they are the same kind of thing as the writings of Trollope and Thackeray.¹

These words look forward to Mrs Leavis’s next considerable piece of writing and her first truly critical essay on the novel: her evaluation of Hawthorne as a dramatic poet. ² I discuss this further in the appendix at the end of this study. Further, in almost every one of her critiques from here on she more or less directly applies the analogy ‘the novel as dramatic poem’: in her critical introductions to Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and Silas Marner, in her ‘fresh approach’ to Wuthering Heights, and in her chapters on David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations in Dickens the Novelist.