Abstract
Addressing Rhoda Broughton’s first three novels, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), Cometh Up as a Flower (1867), and Red as a Rose Is She (1870), this chapter explores the innovative strategies for depicting female sexuality that constitute Broughton’s contribution to Victorian women’s writing, and which include justifying female desire by defining it as natural instinct. The chapter also examines the critique of female disenfranchisement through marriage that places Broughton’s work in tension with the marketplace niche she would fill upon the publication of her third novel. Departing from the sensationalism of her earliest fiction, Red as a Rose Is She established Broughton as a writer of domestic fiction, yet its disturbingly jealous male lead anticipates her later portrayal of women’s sexual suppression within domesticity.
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Notes
- 1.
See her letter to George Bentley, 20 January 1870 (Archives of Richard Bentley and Son).
- 2.
The term ‘erotic sensationalism’ is used to classify Cometh Up as a Flower in the series Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction, Gen. ed. Andrew Maunder.
- 3.
For an account of Not Wisely, but Too Well’s publication history and an appendix detailing changes between the serial and triple-decker, see Heller, Introduction to Not Wisely, but Too Well 5–6, 15–21, and 385–428.
- 4.
For more on the Jane Eyre revision in Not Wisely, but Too Well, see Heller, ‘“That Muddy, Polluted Flood”’ 92–96.
- 5.
See Heller, Introduction to Cometh Up as a Flower xli–xlii and Hallum 50–52 for more on Nell’s anorexia.
- 6.
See Heller, Introduction to Cometh Up as a Flower xlii for more on the concept of ‘disembodied embodiment.’
- 7.
See Helsinger, Veeder, and Sheets chapter 6 (103–25) for a discussion of the ‘magnitude’ (113) of the cultural response to Linton’s essay.
- 8.
Deborah T. Meem discusses the evolution of Linton’s stance on gender issues in her introduction to Linton’s The Rebel of the Family 15–16.
- 9.
See, for example, Not Wisely, but Too Well 423 and Red as a Rose Is She 154, 200, 202.
- 10.
For another discussion of this scene, see Flint 288.
- 11.
In chapter 5 of A Plot of Her Own, Heller discusses Broughton’s innovations in varying the romance formula in the single-volume fiction she produced during the last decades of her career. Some of these late novels never clarify whether or not the heroine actually marries.
- 12.
For more on Good-bye, Sweetheart!, see Heller, ‘Rewriting Corinne.’
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Heller, T. (2020). ‘[F]leshly inclinations’: The Nature of Female Desire in Rhoda Broughton’s Early Fiction. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 2. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38528-6_8
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