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BOOK REVIEW

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, The Middle Class Novels of Arnold Bennett and Marie Corelli: Realising the Ideals and Emotions of Late Victorian Women. Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. 428 pp. ISBN 9780773437395, hbk. £99.95.

Reviewed by Anthony Patterson.

In reference to Joseph Conrad and Marie Corelli, Arnold Bennett, writing in 1908 as Jacob Tonson in the New Age, opined that if Conrad was one “pole”, then Marie Corelli was surely another.  Puns of nationality aside, it could be argued that Bennett  himself was, in a sense, both:  his self-consciously literary art placed him firmly alongside Conrad even while his fast-paced novels, written for mass consumption, showed affinity with Corelli’s  commercial fiction. In order to explore “unmarried middle-class women’s perceptions and emotional concerns during the years 1880-1914” (1), Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, in The Middle Class Novels of Arnold Bennett and Marie Corelli: Realising the Ideals and Emotions of Late Victorian Women, has elected to compare the Corelli pole of sensational fiction with the Bennett pole of literary fiction. The analysis of Bennett’s “serious” novels for an investigation of women’s inner lives is especially interesting given Virginia Woolf’s celebrated attack in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”(1923) on Bennett’s realism for its exaggerated concern with external factors at the expense of interior exploration. Indeed, the terra firma of Bennett’s realism which offers, as Crozier-De Rosa claims, more “detailed observations of female thought and behaviour” (3), lends itself more readily to Crozier-De Rosa’s approach than Corelli’s “more idealised concepts of femininity” (3). Consequently, The Middle Class Novels of Arnold Bennett and Marie Corelli is most intriguing when it situates Bennett’s representation of single Victorian and Edwardian women within the specific contexts of their periods’ gender ideology.

Crozier-De Rosa divides her study into four sections. The introductory section explores late nineteenth-century arguments about gender, highlighting the importance of the New Woman figure to later Edwardian literary representations of women. The section’s first chapter also justifies the choice of Bennett and Corelli as novelists suitable to illuminate the interior lives of women: Crozier-De Rosa yokes them together because they offer contrasting views of female gender. Certainly, Corelli’s scandalously self-indulgent heroines could not be further removed from, in Crozier-De Rosa’s terminology, Bennett’s “more ‘ordinary’ or ‘mundane’” women (4). Nevertheless, Crozier-De Rosa contests that the themes both authors treat were central to the interests of a broad audience. In the section’s second part, she discusses the merits of using fiction as an historical source and cites a number of historians and sociologists such as Bernard Bailyn, Peter and Carol Stearns, Jan Lewis, and Linda Rosenzweig working in the field of the history of emotions to argue that novels provide access “to a community’s collective emotions and experiences” (23). Unfortunately, Crozier-De Rosa’s survey of this fascinating area is too brief to sufficiently ground her own approach in the field.  Moreover, the most recent source Crozier-De Rosa cites is from the early 1990s. Some consideration of more current developments would also have been useful.  At the very least, Crozier-De Rosa might have engaged more fully with Peter Burke’s 1999 assessment of the history of mentalities, rather than relegating it to a footnote.

“What to Do,” the book’s second section, links Bennett’s and Corelli’s fiction to broader trends in women’s education, employment, professional careers, and what Crozier-De Rosa refers to as the “business of domesticity” (124). Crozier-De Rosa’s effective close readings demonstrate how Bennett’s fiction corresponds to contemporary practices as, for instance, when she links the prospectus of Miss Chetwynd’s School in The Old Wives Tale to broader developments in Victorian ideas about female education. In these chapters, Crozier-De Rosa shows her considerable knowledge of the social limitations Victorian and Edwardian Britain placed upon many areas of single women’s lives. Chapter Four also proves enlightening although Crozier-De Rosa’s contention that middle-class women were anything but idle, occupied as they were in household management, left me less sympathetic to them than to the paid servants they could often barely afford. It could be argued that the servant class are beyond the study’s immediate concerns and scope, but a more considered view of the relationship between middle-class women and their servants both in and outside the texts Crozier-De Rosa analyzes would have enhanced this chapter’s focus on the interiority of middle-class women’s lives.

In the third section, Crozier-De Rosa writes cogently about the late Victorian and Edwardian investment in religion and spirituality while arguing, perhaps over-simplistically, that “the term ‘religion’ is more relevant to an analysis of Bennett’s middlebrow literature” and “‘spirituality’ is more suited to a discussion of Corelli’s best-selling novels” (229). Crozier-De Rosa later recognizes Anna Tellwright in Anna of the Five Towns (1902)as “one of Bennett’s most profoundly and most consistently spiritual characters” (254), but more could have been made of Anna’s interior sense of spirituality in relation to the social and ethical constraints placed upon her by the religious community in which she lives. Crozier-De Rosa is, however, especially informative about the gendering of spirituality in Corelli’s fiction and how essential spirituality was to Corelli’s perception of womanhood, noting that Corelli’s stories “demand that ‘true’ women be inherently spiritual” (230). Corelli’s view both reinforced broader cultural attitudes about women’s moral superiority and revealed tensions between that concept and women’s limited ancillary role as helpmates to men. Women’s increasing access to the public sphere, as well as greater recognition of “female intellectuality,” according to Crozier-De Rosa, “made it more difficult for Corelli to claim that female power resided only in the private realm of interiority and spirituality” (230).

Crozier-De Rosa pursues the conflict between notions of the idealized female and male supremacy in the study’s final section that explores the terrain of romantic love and sexual desire in the two writers’ work.  Indeed, there is much to commend in this detailed analysis of sexual desire in Corelli’s and Bennett’s fiction. Crozier-De Rosa is good on Corelli’s idealization of love, which evokes an innocent past that contrasts with the corrupt sexual anarchy of the fin-de-siècle associated with modernity, Decadent aestheticism and New Woman feminism. She also recognizes the extent to which feminism’s confusion between the desire to “banish the brute in men” (310) and their idealization of a notion of purified sex within love relationships extends to Corelli’s fiction. This seeming contradiction, as Crozier-De Rosa acknowledges, is largely ignored by Corelli who condemns “brute sensuality” but “does not remove sex from romantic relationships” (310). Crozier-De Rosa also effectively demonstrates the greater degree to which sexual desire could be expressed in the fiction of the Edwardian period as is evident in Bennett’s writing even if his novels were never as sexually frank as those of H. G. Wells or indeed as graphic as those of D. H. Lawrence. Even so, the chapter would have benefited from a more substantial theoretical underpinning than its over-reliance on Michael Mason’s The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1995), especially considering the wealth of writing on the topic since the mid-1990s.

Nonetheless, Crozier-De Rosa’s impressive knowledge of Bennett’s and Corelli’s fiction usefully calibrates their novelistic constructions of single women with broader historical practices. Her claim that writers, like readers, cannot “transcend their own moral universe” (70-71) and that “novelists, novels and readers are all grounded in society” (70) is indisputable; however, the manner in which they are all differently grounded in society needed more careful consideration than Crozier-De Rosa gives. For instance, while she cites Raymond Williams as support in describing the dynamic relationship between text and society, she offers little nuanced understanding either of class during the late-Victorian period, or of a text’s performance of ideological work. What Crozier-De Rosa describes as a “commonsense approach to fictional texts” (90) can often seem limiting.  A statement such as, “Arnold Bennett’s novels […] borrowing much from the techniques of the French Realists of his era, carefully guide the reactions of his readers” (79), not only fails to specify the nature of the French and Russian techniques that influenced Bennett’s writing, but also oversimplifies the broader conditions of textual production and the processes of reader response.

Nevertheless, there is much in this study that is both insightful and illuminating.  Crozier-De Rosa approaches the novels of Bennett and Corelli from sociological and historical perspectives to explore the difficult area of interiority in the lives of single middle-class women, which is no easy task, as she clearly knows. Discerning interiority from its fictional constructs, influenced as the novel is by, among other complex factors, the aesthetic demands of genre and the commercial demands of the market, is a challenging endeavour, but as Crozier-De Rosa proves, a fruitful one.