Introduction

Lord Byron’s Descendants 79
and more, is that of a “self-promoting, hard-working writer and editor” (65). For
more than twenty years, she was the editor of The Argosy magazine and produced
almost 40 novels and more than 300 short stories and articles. This suggest that
Wood was herself a more interesting woman than she has been given credit for.
Her son presents her writing not as a kind of work but as a peaceful hobby of a
flawless, moral woman writer and his account “overlooks some of the more complicated
elements of Wood’s writing career to assure readers that her femininity
was never compromised by her fame” (Introduction: Ellen Wood 153). Her son
obviously realised the importance of presenting his mother as a delicate woman, in
order to disguise her “unfeminine” energy of management skills and literary aspirations.
Critics like Maunder judge East Lynne to be “a host of contemporary moral,
social and scientific anxieties to the fore” and comment that the “moral contamination
of the wife and mother gone mad with uncontrolled sexual longing” is
severely punished, as Wood presents it as a “threat to the individual family unit
and broader morality of the nation as a whole” (59). Nevertheless, critics like
Showalter argue that Wood had a “powerful appeal to the female audience by
subverting the traditions of feminine fiction to suit their own imaginative impulses,
by expressing a wide range of suppressed female emotions, and by trapping
and satisfying fantasies of protest and escape” ((1977) 158). Accordingly, the
character of Wood-criticism is dualistic, as she is either depicted as a stern moralist
or as “the emancipated daughter of Charlotte Brontë and a cultural critic” (Introduction:
Ellen Wood, Writer 152).
4.1.3 Feminist Criticism
In the second half of the twentieth century, feminist criticism discovered a new
interest in the novel, as it powerfully describes a maternal melodrama and is concerned
with the restrictions imposed on women in order to become the perfect
woman. Wynne comments that nowadays East Lynne is considered as “the archetypal
woman’s novel, its mixture of sentiment and sensation forming a model for
later examples of popular romantic fiction” (61). She continues to argue that,
“Wood’s famous address to the reader as “Lady – wife – mother” is an exhortation
to women to bear any burden in the cause of domestic unity and appears to
establish East Lynne firmly as women’s fiction” (61).
Feminist criticism has put its focus on Lady Isabel as exemplifying the “tensions
and restrictions associated with Victorian codes of femininity” (67). However,
feminist critics have mainly emphasised Isabel’s role as a mother and read
East Lynne as a maternal melodrama. Thus, A. Kaplan sees Isabel’s story as a
melodramatic warning against disproportionate feelings for her children.
Cvetkovich also focuses on the melodramatic plot surrounding Isabel by describing
East Lynne as a “drama of effects” that “transforms a narrative of female