Current evaluations of Mrs. Humphry Ward as novelist range
from "Victorian anti-feminist" to "New Woman novelist" and "rebel."
For a more nuanced treatment of Ward, which would justify her
initial reception as an important serious novelist who engaged
her readers in imaginative experiments on important social and
moral questions, this essay examines five novels as a series, in
accordance with Hans Robert Jauss's methodological precept in
his seminal essay, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary
Theory." According to Jauss, such a literary series implies "a dialogical
and at once processlike relationship between work, audience,
and new work."
In The Tragic Comedians and Diana of the Crossways , George Meredith alludes to the notorious life-writings of two contemporary women, Helene von Racowitza and Caroline Norton. Both women's narratives told of a public scandal surrounding their public and illicit love affair with a leading politician: in Racowitza's case, the German Social-Democratic leader Ferdinand Lassalle; and in Norton's, Lord Melbourne, then prime minister. Both women had assertively transgressed the ideology of separate spheres by entering the sphere of politics through their erotic and intellectual companionship. This essay examines the ways in which Meredith's fiction transforms these feminine, pathetic life-writings into masculine tragicomedies that are instructive examples of the condition of male-female relations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.