Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

"She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces."

Silly Novels By Lady Novelists is an essay written by George Eliot in 1856, in which she skewers so many Common Mary Sue Traits it's amazing — everything from her beautiful singing voice to her hordes of admirers to her astounding intellect.

While the essay seems to mostly skewers Mary Sue Tropes and several people qualify it as an early example of sporking, the actual target of the essay are both the Strictly Formula nature of the fiction written by other female authors of her era (most of their output being the XIX century predecessors of Harlequin and Mills and Boons novels) and how the very low quality of those novels keep alive the notion that female authors are shallow and uninspired and their books are silly romances of no transcendence. It also skewers how many of these authors use the Starving Artist myth to protect themselves of criticism.

A copy of the essay can be read in the Source tab above. Please blue shift it accordingly

Tropes diagnosed in this essay (not all Mary Sue Tropes, actually):

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.

...whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming and locks more redundant than ever.

The vicious baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favor to him, to marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement.

The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. ... If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.

  • Dude in Distress
  • Duel to the Death: A frequent occurrence In the "mind-and-millinery" type of novel, usually to dispatch the Evil Baronet the heroine has wrongly married.
  • Easy Evangelism: Elliot mocks how the heroines in the Silly Novels of oracular and evangelical dispositions are able to convert even the unwilling.
  • Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry
  • Genius Book Club: According to Eliot, the "intelligent" heroines all have read the same books that were considered the mark of intelligence at the time, mostly the Greek and Roman classics like Virgil, Livy and Horace.
  • Gilded Cage: In the opinion of Eliot, both the heroines of Silly Novels and the Lady Novelist who wrote them live in these.
  • Historical Fiction: one of the "oracular" novels Eliot describes allegedly takes place in a Medieval era.
  • Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Eliot suggest that this is the reason behind so many Silly Novels: their authors are way too impressed to having get at education at all that they become extremely impressed with their own erudition, so they don't realize how trite and clichés their plots are and how mediocre their writing actually is. Woman with similar level of ability but more self-awareness just won't publish their writings, and women with a bit more talent and awareness actually write good stuff.
  • Improbable Age: Along with the example mocked in Little Professor Dialog below, many heroines are portrayed as being extremely educated before being 18.
  • Informed Ability: Particularly the intellect of the Silly Novels heroines. Elliot points that is because their authors are trying to write women that are smarter than themselves, and in doing so they fail; she actually praise an author who leave all proof of her heroine's intelligence offscreen, as doing so makes the text actually more readable and less tedious.
  • Little Professor Dialog: Elliot quotes a particularly egregious example where a 4 and a half year-old kid dispenses a Purple Prose Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness filled discourse, and how ridiculous it actually sounds.
  • Long-Lost Relative
  • Love At First Sight

"They see her at a ball, and they are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanor."

There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen something of children under five years of age, yet in “Compensation,” a recent novel of the mind-and-millinery species, which calls itself a “story of real life,” we have a child of four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic fashion:
“‘Oh, I am so happy, dear grand mamma;—I have seen—I have seen such a delightful person; he is like everything beautiful—like the smell of sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lemond;—or no, better than that—he is like what I think of and see when I am very, very happy; and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings; and his forehead is like that distant sea,’ she continued, pointing to the blue Mediterranean; ‘there seems no end—no end; or like the clusters of stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night. . . . Don’t look so . . . your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the wind is blowing and the sun is gone in; I like the sunshine best when the lake is smooth. . . . So now—I like it better than ever . . . It is more beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, when the sun suddenly lights up all the colors of the forests and shining purple rocks, and it is all reflected in the waters below.’”
We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon, who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed by gin, is herself a phœnix. We are assured, again and again, that she had a remarkably original in mind, that she was a genius, and “conscious of her originality,” and she was fortunate enough to have a lover who was also a genius and a man of “most original mind.”

  • Nice Guy: The designated hero of the Evangelical white neck-cloth species.
  • Omniglot A frequent trait of these heroines. Eliot mock one of these thus:

Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline.

Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress—that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end.

 It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life.

  • Starving Artist: discussed: while people may believe that the Lady Novelists that author Silly Novels were destitute women (who become writers as an alternative to become a governess, the only other "acceptable" female profession of the era) and excuse their faults under the belief that those are written by barely educated ladies trying to bring bread to their families, Eliot points out that, given how deeply inaccurate their portrayal of the low class is compared on how sightly inaccurate the one of the high class views are, that such silly novels are more probably written by middle and high class ladies with nothing better to do with their time.

It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains.

There is a striking resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for instance, as that "It is a fact, no less true than melancholy, that all people, more or less, richer or poorer, are swayed by bad example;" that "Books, however trivial, contain some subjects from which useful information may be drawn;" that "Vice can too often borrow the language of virtue;" that "Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be accepted, for clamor and pretension cannot impose upon those too well read in human nature to be easily deceived;" and that "In order to forgive, we must have been injured." There is doubtless a class of readers to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent; for we often find them doubly and trebly scored with the pencil, and delicate hands giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by a distinct très vrai, emphasized by many notes of exclamation.

  • Stop Being Stereotypical: Eliot is quite worried that the Silly Novels that are the output of Lady novelists are actually harming the cause on giving women education, as they may give people who believe that women are too dumb for being educated proof that the ones that did receive an education only seemed to have got Delusions of Eloquence on the bargain.
  • Virgin Power
  • Wrong Guy First: the stereotypical plot of a Silly Novel, most frequent in the ones of the "mind-and-millinery species".

For all this she as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right moment.

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