Instructed Women and the Case of Romola

Abstract

Eliot’s reputation as a timid feminist, at best, is well documented by her cautious endorsement of social measures designed to rectify the institutionalised discrimination practised against women in her time. The least equivocal approval of political action to be found in her letters comes in her sanction of a petition drawn up in 1856 by Barbara Leigh Smith calling for amendment of the laws relating to married women. The terms of her approval, however, are somewhat ambiguous. Congratulating Sara Hennel for having ‘taken up the cause’ in signing the petition, Eliot revealingly adds that she thinks the proposed laws ‘would help to raise the position and character of women’, a hoped for elevation which tends to diminish the present character of women as Eliot perceived it.¹ That Eliot retained her dim view of women’s characters is confirmed by Emily Davies, founder of Girton, who discovered in 1876 that the mandate for girls’ education set forth by arguably the most prominent Victorian woman intellectual was peculiarly gauzy, almost comically abstract.