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Fœmina Vera in Charles Reade's Novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
One of the commonest headings in the notebooks on which Charles Reade founded his novels is fœmina vera. He considered himself an authority on woman. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette he calls himself “a patient drudge, who has studied that sex profoundly in various walks of life.” Certainly his women are more memorable, and the subject of more comment and criticism, than his men. To them W. D. Howells devoted a long essay in his Heroines of Fiction. Though, like his men, they fall into easily recognizable, frequently repeated types, they are more alive, more real, less subordinate to the demands of story structure. The result of more study and more enthusiasm, they are less romanticized, less melodramatized than his heroes and villains.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1931
References
1 The extant notebooks are in the London Library. Passages from them in this article are quoted by permission of the Committee of that library, and its librarian, Dr. C. Hagbert Wright.
2 Readiana: The Legal Vocabulary.
3 It is Never too Late to Mend, chap. lxxxv.
4 A Woman Hater, chap. xxxii.
5 A Woman Hater, chap. xiv.
6 Love Me Little, Love Me Long, chap. xiv.
7 Chap. vi.
8 Chap. ix.
9 Chap, xxxvi.
10 Chap. ii.
11 Chap. xvi.
12 Chap. iii.
13 Chap. xxv.
14 Chap. ii.
16 The Cloister and the Hearth, chap. xxxvi.
16 Chap. v.
17 The Cloister and the Hearth, chap. xxxvi.
18 Ibid.
19 Chap. xxix.
20 Chap. xciv.
21 Chap. xxxv. This incident is anticipated in Griffith Gaunt (chap. xx) in a speech by Jane, a discharged servant, which indicated Reade's belief that women commit suicide without due cause: “What will father say? He'll give me a hiding. For two pins I'd drown myself in the mere.”
22 Chap. xxxix.
23 Chap. xvii or xix (according to edition).
24 Good Stories of Man and Other Animals: Doubles.
25 Chap. xxxii or xxxiv (according to edition).
26 Chap. ii.
27 Chap. iii.
28 Chap. xii.
29 Chap. xvi.
30 Chap. III.
31 Chap. xl.
32 End chap. viii. beginning chap. ix.
33 Chap. xv.
34 Chap. xix.
35 Chap. xx.
36 Chap. li.
37 Chap. i.
38 Chap. xxxiv.
39 Chap. xxxviii.
40 Chap. xiv.
41 Chap. xvi.
42 Chap. ii.
43 Chap. xxxiii.
44 Chap. xxxi.
45 Ibid.
46 Chap. xxxiii.
47 Chap. xxxix.
48 Chap. xli.
49 Chap. xlii.
50 Chap. iv.
51 Chap. ii.