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Other lady novelists
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near London, and Mrs Oliphant handles many of the topical themes
of class, religion, and progress with immense verve. If the series were
to be dramatised on television, as many Victorian novels have been,
Mrs Oliphant might reach an enormous new audience. Her series
Stories of the Seen and Unseen (from 1880) exploits the late Victorian
fascination with death and the soul.
Mrs Oliphant proclaimed that she was shocked by the works of
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose sensational Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
was one of the lasting successes of the time. It introduced ‘the fairhaired
demon of modern fiction’, the scandalous woman, whose role
would become more and more serious and socially significant towards
the end of the century – in works by Thomas Hardy, George Moore,
and Oscar Wilde. Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd (1863) are
the two best-known novels of over seventy works by Miss Braddon.
East Lynne (1861), the first novel by Mrs Henry Wood (born Ellen
Price), was similarly sensational and similarly successful. It was the
first of her many mysteries in middle-class settings, which are
forerunners of the crime genre so successful in the twentieth century.
Mrs Henry Wood’s novels are distinguished not only for their careful
plotting and detailed settings, but there is usually also a degree of
social awareness: strikes and unemployment feature often. This is not
escapist fiction, but entertainment with something of a conscience.
Mrs Eliza Lynn Linton was something of a reactionary, attacking
feminism and concepts of ‘the New Woman’. Her collected journalism,
The Girl of the Period (1883), gives a memorable counterblast to the
burgeoning ideas of female liberation. Of her many novels, historical
and contemporary, Rebel of the Family (1880) is probably the best
remembered, although the earlier Joshua Davidson (1872) is a
remarkably socialist novel in its sympathies.
Mrs Humphry (Mary Augusta) Ward was from the same family as Matthew
Arnold, and her novels reflect the intellectual and religious ambience of
Oxford and the Oxford Movement (see page 282). Robert Elsmere (1888)
was her most famous work; Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) one of the most
distinctive. Her works are quite different from those of Mrs Oliphant and
Miss Braddon: they are full of high moral purpose, an earnestness which
had gone out of fashion more rapidly than wit and sensation. Mrs Humphry
Ward was an early feminist, and follows George Eliot as one of the most
distinguished of serious women writers of the late Victorian period.