Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

The line of least resistance
Jane Melville (Mr Hogarth’s Will) and Liliard Abercrombie (Handfasted) are far
less conventional at the opening of their stories. Jane has been given an education like
that of a man, and then cast into the world to make a living. Her conversation with
Mr Rennie, who will not give her a job because she is a woman, is an explicit statement
of outrage at a gender-divided labour market. 70 She finally secures employment
as a governess-cum-housekeeper in the household of some Australians visiting their
homeland, and, like Margaret Elliot, seeks to influence the wider world indirectly.
Margaret hopes to work with, and through, her brother; Jane works with the male
cousin whom, once he has shed his inheritance, she marries. Liliard Abercrombie was
bound to be unconventional since she had grown up in an Arcadian society, separated
from the rest of the world for three generations. But she is unconventional in
Columba, too. She aspires to a degree of learning and public usefulness reserved for
a social group to which she does not belong. She is imaginative, spontaneous, and –
aided by the odd garments into which she has knitted stories she has heard told – she
is an emotionally powerful public speaker, an ability of distinction in an oral culture. 71
She is also independent, insisting upon the legitimacy of the bond she forms with the
hero in Columba, even when they leave that hidden valley and enter a world which
regards their union as wholly unsanctified. Only after suffering her apparent loss of
reputation, and a disfiguring attack of smallpox, does she dwindle into a wife.
Spence’s heroines may be less unconventional than they appear at first sight.
Clara Morison asks Reginald, during one of their literary discussions, ‘Is not Jane
Eyre, who is neither handsome nor what is called good, a much more interesting
and natural character than you will find in men’s books?’ 72 Margaret Oliphant noted
as early as 1855 that Jane Eyre had changed the direction of the female tradition in
English writing, and Elaine Showalter observed over a century later: ‘The influence
of Jane Eyre on Victorian heroines was felt to have been revolutionary. The post-Jane
heroine, according to the periodicals, was plain, rebellious, and passionate; she was
likely to be a governess, and she was usually the narrator of her own story’. 73 Spence’s
heroines are not sexually passionate, nor do they narrate their own stories. But they
are often plain, often governesses, sometimes passionate about public affairs, and
always – however mildly – rebellious. Moreover they inhabit worlds in which there
are other remarkable women: Margaret Elliot, a blue-stocking; Rose Lancaster, an
intellectual; the independent-minded Mrs Lindsay, and her daughter, Jessie, who
proposes to the man she loves on her way to do the milking. All of these characters
are most unconventional when compared with Thackeray’s schemers or Dickens’ in-
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