Clio's voice regained : historical novels by four nineteenth-century women

This study attempted to explore the relationship between history, readers, and the presentation of that history by women authors in four nineteenth-century British historical novels. Applying an idea originally suggested by Joseph Turner about a reader-response approach to historical novels using terminology from Hegel's Philosophy of History (organic, reflective, philosophical), four novels were designated "philosophical" historical novels. Having so classified the novels, the ways in which Fanny Burney's The Wanderer (1814), Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and George Eliot's Romola (1862-3) encouraged philosophical reflection about history on the part of their readers were discussed. This philosophical reflection tended to require the readers to revise their assumptions about history, progress, and the role of the reader.

It was concluded that this approach to historical novels, by focusing less on what the history was and more upon what the combined effect of historical elements on the reader might be, changed what might be defined in literary studies as "historical." Women writers, it seems, took the philosophical, rather than the reflective or organic approaches to history because of their less authoritative position (than male authors) with relation to their readers. By writing historical novels, women writers could make themselves purveyors of "truth" while undermining confidence that the foundations of these so-called truths were unquestionable and adequate to explain the never-before- uttered histories that are first given voice in their works. Full proof of this assertion, though, would require a fuller study of nineteenth-century historical novels drawing on the contributions of both male and female authors.