SOURCE: "The Woman of the Novelists," in The Critical Attitude, Duckworth & Co., 1911, 190 p.

[In the following essay, Ford presents, in the form of a letter, an analysis of the "Woman of the Novelists, " which he defines as the amalgam of women as portrayed in literature, finding that presentations of female characters are generally harmful to women in society and personal life.]

My dear mesdames, X, Y, and Z.

We should like you to observe that we are writing to you not on the women, but on the Woman of the novelists. The distinction is very deep, very serious. If we were writing on female characters—on the women of the novelists—we should expect to provide a series of notes on the female characters of our predecessors or our rivals. We should say that Amelia (Fielding's Amelia) was too yielding, and we should look up Amelia and read passages going to prove our contention. Or we should say we envied Tom Jones—and again give our reasons for that envy. We should say that Amelia Osborne (Thackeray's Amelia) was a bore. And we should bore you with passages about Amelia. We should flash upon you Clarissa and Pamela; Portia and the patient Grisel; Di Vernon and Lady Humphrey's Daughter (perhaps that is not the right title); Rose (from Evan Harrington)—we adore Rose and very nearly believe in her—and Mr Haggard's "She." We should in fact try to present you with a series of Plutarch's Lives in tabloid form, contrasting Amelia Osborne with Fielding's Amelia; Rose Harrington with Lady Rose's Daughter (we have got the title right this time) or Portia with the heroine of What Maisie Knew. It would be fun and it would be quite easy: we should just have to write out a string of quotations, and there would be an end of it.

But the "Woman of the Novelists" is quite other guess work. It is analysis that is called for—analysis that is hard to write and harder to read. To put it as clearly as we can, all the women of the novelists that you have read make up for you the Woman of the Novelists. She is, in fact, the creature that you average out as woman.

For you who are women, this creature is not of vast importance as an object lesson. For us men she is of the utmost. We fancy that, for most of us she is the only woman that we really know. This may seem to some of you an extravagant statement. Let us examine it a little more closely.

Has it occurred to you to consider how few people you really know?—How few people, that is to say, there are whose biographies, whose hearts, whose hopes, whose desires and whose fears you have really known and sounded! As you are women and a good many of you are probably domestic women, this will not appear to you as clear as it will to most men. Yet it will be clear enough. Let us put a case—the case we know best—our own, in fact.

We have a way of putting ourselves to sleep at night by indulging in rather abstruse mental calculations. Lately we figured out for ourselves how many people we know, however slightly. The limits we set were that we should know their names, be able to sit next them at table. We could reckon up rather over a thousand—to be exact, one thousand and forty.

But of all of these how many do we really know? The figure that we have arrived at may seem a little preposterous, but we have considered them rather carefully. We know intimately the circumstances and the aspirations of eight men and two women and we are bound to say that both women say we do not understand them. Still for the purposes of our argument we will say that we do.

In the present-day conditions of life, as we have said, men are more prone to these acquaintanceships that are not knowledge. They go to business and negotiate with great numbers of simulacra in the shape of men. Some have eyes, beards, voices, humours and tempers; some are merely neckties, waistcoats or penholders. But as to how these simulacra live, what they really desire—apart from their functional desires to outwit us in the immediate business in hand—as to what they are as members of society, we have, as a rule, no knowledge at all.

We meet at our club every day from twenty to thirty men of whose circumstances we have not the least idea. One of them is, for instance, quite good company, distinguished and eminently conversational. We know what his public function is: we know his politics: we know his vices. But as for knowing him: why, we have never even looked him up in Who's Who to see if he is married!

And, if we are so walled off from men, how much more are we walled off from women? I should say that, out of that odd thousand acquaintances, about six hundred are women. Yet the conventions of modern life prevent us from really knowing more than two—and those two, we are told, we do not understand.

We daresay we don't. But who is to blame? Why, the Woman of the Novelists.

We trust that, by now, you know what we are driving at. For the conditions of modern life are such that for experience of our fellow men we have to go almost entirely to books. And the books that we go to for this knowledge are those of the imaginative writers.

(Thus among novelists—or the greatest of English novelists—we should include Shakespeare. We should also include Chaucer and perhaps the English dramatists up to Sheridan—the dramatists like Congreve, that is, who are read and not performed. We have reasons for making these inclusions that we will not dwell upon.)

We may take ourself to be the average man: the man in the street. And you will find that the man in the street—or rather the men on your hearthstones—your husbands and brothers—are in much the same case as ourself. You will find that they know up to a score or so of men. You will—if you are the average wife—take care that they don't know more than a couple of women, one of them being yourself. And you will all agree with us when we say that your husbands and your brothers do not understand you. They think they do; but they do not. Poor simple, gross creatures, for them two and two will be four. For you—I wonder how much two and two are?

Yet your man of the hearthstone will talk about woman. He will talk about her with a simple dogmatism, with a childish arrogance. He will tread on all your corns. He will say that women are incapable of humour. (Of course, in his mind he will exclude you and his sister and mother—but he will never make you believe that.) He will say that women are changeable. (He will probably include you in that.) He will say that every woman is at heart a rake. (We do not know where you come in there.) He will say that a certain lane is called Dumb Woman's Lane because it is so steep that no woman's feet ever carried her up it. Well, you know all about what he will say as well as we do.

But you observe: he is talking about Woman; he talks with the confidence of an intimate. But what woman is it that he talks of? Why is it that you are not torn with pangs of jealousy when he thus speaks? Who is this creature; incapable of humour, steadfastness, virtue or reticence? You are not alarmed: you do not suddenly say to yourself: "Are these the women he spends his time with when he pretends to be at his office, his club, his golflinks or his tailor's?" You are quite tranquil on that account; you hate him for his conceit, but you know you have him safe. This is no woman of prey that he is analysing. Women of prey are more attractive: they bewilder, they ensnare, they do not leave room for dogmatism. No, This is the Woman of the Novelist!

We do not mean to say that there have never been men whose views of women were founded upon actual experience, who took lines of their own and adhered to them. There have even been imaginative writers who have done this: there have been, that is to say, misogynists, as there have been women worshippers, and there have been a few men to whom the eternal feminine presents eternal problems for curiosity.

We do not recall, at this moment, any great novelist who has actually been a misogynist: it would indeed be a little difficult to write a novel from a misogynistic point of view—though there are several novelists who come as nearly as is possible to a pitch of altogether ignoring the Fair Sex.

The Fair Sex! Do not these two words bring to mind the greatest of all misogynists—Arthur Schopenhauer? For, says he, that we should call the narrow-chested, broad hipped, short-legged, small waisted, low-browed, lightbrained tribe, the Fair Sex, is that not a proof of the Christo-Germanic stupidity from which all we Teutons suffer?

We wonder how many of you have read Schopenhauer's Über die Weiber? If you have not you should certainly do so. It is an indictment of what—owing to various causes—women may sink to. It is, of course, exaggerated; but it is savagely witty in the extreme. (And, if it enrage you, go on to read the other monograph in Parerga and Paralipomena in which Schopenhauer attacks carters who crack whips. Über Lärm und Geräusch it is called. There you will see that what Schopenhauer attacks—along with one type of woman—is the middling sorts of men.)

The one type of woman that he attacks—the garrulous, light-headed, feather-brained type that he says includes all woman-kind—this one type was drawn from the one woman from whom Schopenhauer really suffered. Schopenhauer was—his pasquinades apart—a mystic and dogged thinker, and the thinker is apt to consider that his existence is the all important thing in this world—and that the disturber of his existence is the greatest of criminals.

The one woman from whom he suffered was his mother. All other women he stalled off; his mother he could not. And Johanna Schopenhauer was what you might call a terror.

To begin with, for a considerable portion of Schopenhauer's life, she held the purse strings. She was an indomitable, garrulous creature. (Need we say that she was one of the most successful women novelists of her day?) She had the power to approach Schopenhauer at all times: to talk to him incessantly: to reproach this needy and lofty thinker with his want of success as a writer: to recommend him to follow her example and become a successful novelist.

So that, actually, it was his mother's type that he was attacking when he thought—or pretended to think—that he was attacking all womenkind. And that, upon the whole, is what has happened to most of the few writers who have systematically attacked women. We do not think, as we have said, that there are many of these, but some writers have had rather narrow escapes. There was, for instance, Gustave Flaubert.

Flaubert was several times pressed to marry, but he always refused and he gave his reason that: "Elle pourrait entrer dans mon cabinet"—"She might come into my study." From this you will observe that he found just such another woman as was Johanna Schopenhauer. And indeed it was just such another—the lady he called La Muse—that he found. The Muse was the only woman with whom he came really into contact—and she was a popular novelist, a writer of feuilletons and of fashion pages, an incessant chatterer. She was no doubt a sufficiently attractive woman to tempt Flaubert towards a close union. But his own wisdom and the fact that she plagued him incessantly to read her manuscripts let him save himself with a whole skin. He was not minded to give her the right—or at any rate the power—to come into his study.

If he had done so—who knows?—under the incessant stimulus of her presence he might have joined the small band of writers who have been women haters.

As it is he was—not so much a misanthropist—a hater of his kind as a lover of what is shipshape. He had in fact The Critical Attitude. And seeing how badly—how stupidly—the affairs of this world are governed—this loving the Shipshape rendered him perpetually on the look-out for the imbecilities of poor humanity.

If he was hard upon women, he was harder, without doubt, upon men. Madame Bovary is idle, silly, hyperromantic, unprincipled, mendacious—but she is upon the whole more true to her poor little lights than most of the male characters of the book—than Homais the quack, than her two lovers—and she is less imbecile than her husband. And indeed, the most attractive and upon the whole the wisest in the conduct of life and in human contacts—the most attractive and wisest character that Flaubert ever drew is Madame Arnoux in L'Education Sentimentale. She is nearly a perfect being, recognising her limitations and fulfilling her functions. I do not think that Flaubert drew more than one other such—the inimitable Félicité, the patient household drudge, in the Cœur Simple. Bouvard and Pécuchet are lovable buffoons or optimists, brave and impracticable adventurers into the realms of all knowledge: these two dear men are one or the other as you look at them. Flaubert drew them lovingly but we are not certain that he loved them; it is impossible to doubt that he loved Madame Arnoux, the lady, and Félicité of the Simple Soul. He drew each of them as being efficient—and since he drew two efficient women, and no efficient man at all—we may consider him to have given us the moral that, in an imbecile world, as he saw it, woman had a better chance than man.

We are not quite certain whether we regard Flaubert or Turgenev as having been the greatest novelist the world ever produced. If we introduce a third name—that of Shakespeare—we grow a little more certain. For we should hesitate to say that Flaubert was greater than Shakespeare—in fact we are sure we should not say it—but we are pretty certain that Turgenev was.

His personality was more attractive than Flaubert's—and his characters are more human than Shakespeare's were. So we should give the palm of the supreme writer to Turgenev—and so, we fancy, would every woman if she were wise. For Turgenev was a great lover—a great champion—of women. He was a great lover—a great champion, too, we may say—of humanity. Where Flaubert saw only that humanity was imbecile, Turgenev, kindlier and more sympathetic, saw generally that men were gullible and ineffectual angels. And it is significant that all the active characters—all the persons of action—in Turgenev's novels are women, There is just one man of action—of mental and political action—in all Turgenev's works—and that man, Solomin, the workman agitator, is the one great failure of all Turgenev's projections. He is wooden and unconvincing, an abstractly invented and conventional figure.

And this preponderance of the Fair Sex in Turgenev's action does not come about because Turgenev was a champion of women: it arises simply because of the facts of Russian life as Turgenev saw them. (And let us offer you as an argument, when you are most confounded with the dogma that women never did anything political, the cases of Russia and Poland. For, when the history of the Russian Revolution comes to be written it will be seen that an enormous proportion of the practical organising work of the revolution was done by women, the comparatively ineffectual theorising has been in the main the work of men. As for Poland—the Polish national spirit has been kept alive almost solely by the women.)

So with Turgenev: if you take such a novel as The House of Gentlefolk you will find that it is Lisa who is the active character, taking a certain course which she considers as the course of duty and persevering in it. Her lover, Lavretsky, on the other hand, is an ineffectual being, resigned if you will, but resigned to the action of destiny. And, roughly speaking, this is the case with all Turgenev's characters. It is Bazaroff the Nihilist who is in the hands of the woman he loves: it is only in the physical activities of the peasants that the man takes the upper hand.

But Turgenev, if he was a great lover of women, did not idealise them. We love Lisa with a great affection: she might be our patient but inflexible sister: we love her and believe in her because she is the creation of a patient and scrupulous hand.

Let us now consider the woman of the English novelist—because, alas, we are a nation of readers so insular that only a few thousands of us have heard of Madame Bovary and a very few hundreds of Lisa. Consequently, these figures hardly bulk at all as colouring the figure of the Woman of the Novelist as she affects us English.

Let us consider the best known woman of action in English imaginative writing; let us consider Portia. Here we have a woman witty a little beyond woman's wit: graceful a little beyond woman's grace: gracious a little beyond the graciousness of women: with a knowledge of the male heart a little beyond the knowledge that woman ever had. She is, in fact, the super-woman.

If we love Liza, we adore Portia: but if we believe in Turgenev's heroine do we ever quite believe in Shakespeare's? Do we ever quite—to the very back of our minds—believe in Cordelia? Or in Beatrice? Or in Desdemona? Or in Juliet? Do we believe that we shall ever meet with a woman like these? And—what is more important still—do we ever believe that these woman will "wear," that their qualities will not pall, their brilliances create in us no impatience, or cause in them no reactions that in their effects would try us beyond bearing? Portia might get us out of a scrape: Juliet might answer passion with passion: Desdemona might bear with our illhumours: Beatrice would pique us delightfully whilst we were courting. We might, in fact—we do certainly—believe in these super-women during certain stages of our lives. But . . . what a very big "But" that is!

And yet, with the women of Shakespeare the tradition of the Woman of the Novelist is already in full swing. This particular good woman—the heroine of an episode—is a peculiarly English product—a product of what Schopenhauer called, as we have said, Christo Germanisch Dummheit (Christo Germanic stupidity.) It is hardly, in fact, stupidity: it is rather idealism. (But then in the practical affairs of the world idealism is very nearly the same thing as stupidity.) The man, in fact, who would marry Beatrice would be a stupid man, or one obsessed by erotic idealism. (For certainly—quite certainly—she would "entrer dans son cabinet.")

Do not please imagine that these are mere cheapnesses. Or, if they are, consider how life itself is a matter of infinite cheapnesses. And then consider again how this tradition of the super-woman heroine, the woman who is the central figure of an episode—has come right down to our own time on the wings of the English novel. She is always, this super-woman, gliding along some few inches above the earth, as we glide when we dream we are flying. She is a sort of Diana with triumphant mien before whose touch all knotted problems dissolve themselves. So she has traversed, this woman of the novelist, down and across the ages until we find her, triumphant and buoyant still, in the novels of Mr Meredith. Do not we all adore Rose and Diana and Letty—and all these other wonderful creatures? And do not we all, at the back of our minds, disbelieve in them?

You will say that Mr Meredith is the great painter of your sex. But you will not believe that: the statement is a product of emotion. You mean that he is the great pleader for your sex.

Ah! the Woman of the Novelist—the Woman of the Novelist: what great harm she has done to the cause of women in these days and for centuries back!

For consider what she has done: when Elizabethan England put Portia on the stage the Elizabethan Englishman considered that he had in public treated Woman so handsomely that she had got as much as she could reasonably expect. He proceeded in private, to cheat her out of ninetenths of what she deserved.

You have only to read any of the innumerable Advices to a Son, written by various Tudor gentlemen to realise to what an extent this was really the case. The son was advised to regard his wife as a very possibly—a very probably—dangerous adjunct to a house. She was esteemed likely to waste a man's substance, to cheat his heirs in the interests of an almost inevitable second marriage. She was not to be chosen for her talkativeness as that would distract a man: (elle pourrait, in fact, entrer dans son cabinet) She was not to be of a silent disposition because she could not entertain him when he needed entertainment.

And so—hardly and coldly—with that peculiar hardness and coldness that distinguished all the real manifestations of Tudor prudence—were the lines of women's life laid down in these Tudor testaments. Woman was a necessary animal, a breeder of children; but she was a very dangerous one, or at least a very uncertain beast—a chestnut horse exhibited most of her characteristics. Desdemona and the patient Grisel were acknowledged to be dreams: Beatrice of the ready tongue was to be eschewed, and as for Portia—the Elizabethan was pretty sure, even his lawyers with their settlements could not bind her!

So that, in Elizabethan days, as to-day, you had a Woman of the Novelists, a Super-Woman—set on high and worshipped. But you had a very different woman whom you contemplated—if you were a man—from behind the locked doors of your cabinet.

To-day we have still the Woman of the Novelists—the woman of Mr Meredith. Like Portia she is inimitable in episodes: she will get a man out of a scrape: she will be inimitable too during a season of courtship. We do not, being English, go in for the novel of life: we do not want to: we do not want to face life. When we marry, it is a woman something like Portia, or Di Vernon, or Sophia Western, or Rose Harrington that we marry. We have given up as impracticable the Elizabethan habit of attempting, by selection or settlements, to choose and to tie down a partner for life. We have given it up; we say: "The Woman of the Novelists is one thing; but as for the woman we shall marry, she is an incomprehensible creature, bewildering and unknowable. We must take our chance."

But we should like to point out to you that we might say almost the same thing if we were going to make an indissoluble life-partnership with any man. We have, as it were, a romantic—a novelist's—idea that men, as distinguished from women, are upright, logical, hardworking, courageous, businesslike. We do not really believe this. But, if we go into partnership with a man, we do it because we like him or believe in him; because, in fact, he appeals to us. We cannot tell how he will wear, any more than we can tell how the woman we marry, or want to marry, will wear. He may go off with the till: it may prove intolerable to sit day after day in the same office with such a bounder; the fact that he comes in at night full of energy and loquacity may be intolerable, too, if he is sharing our rooms.

This will not much surprise us in a man. It is apt to disconcert us very much in our Portia—and we say: "What a strange beast woman is! She was so clever with Shylock. Has not she got the tact to see that we need our studies to ourselves?"

Of course, the woman that we know, the woman, that is to say, that eventually each of us gets to know, is fused at last into the Woman of the Novelists. This invariably happens, for we woo a Portia who has neither a past nor a future, and life welds for us this Portia into an ordinary woman. This combination of the Woman of the Novelists who is always in one note with a creature of much the same patiences, impatiences, buoyant moments, reactions, morning headaches and amiabilities, as our own—this hybrid of a conventional deity and a quite real human being is a very queer beast indeed. We wonder if you ever quite realise what you are to the man on your hearthstone? We do not know if any woman ever really thinks—really—truly—and to the depths of her whole being—thinks that she has a bad husband. We do not know about this, but we are perfectly certain that no husband ever thinks that he has a bad wife. You see— poor, honest, muddled man with the glamour of the novelist's woman on him—he is always looking about somewhere in the odd and bewildering fragments of this woman who has the power to bedevil, to irritate, to plague and to madden him. He looks about in this mist of personal contacts for the Cordelia that he still believes must be there. He believes that his Sophia Western is still the wise, tolerant, unjealous Sophia, who once made him with the blessing of some Parson Adams, the happiest of men. God forbid that we should say she is not there. We are certain that the man believes she is, only he cannot find her. He is so close to her, and you know that if you hold your nose very close to a carpet, it is useless to hope to see its pattern. But no—believe us when we say that no man in the silence of his study believes that he has a bad wife. She may drink, but he will think that some action, some attribute, or the circumstances of the life that she has led with him, gives excuse. She may nag, but he will believe that it is because he has never really taken the trouble to explain the excellencies of his motives and his actions. She may be unfaithful, but in his heart he will believe that it is because he has been unable to maintain the strain of playing Benedick to her Beatrice. And this poor, honest, simple man may declaim against his wife to his friends, may seek in new Amelias new disillusionments, may seek amid the glamour of causes celèbres his liberty—but he will listen to the words of his K.C.—of his special pleading conscience—with a certain contrition, for before his eyes, dimly radiant, there will stand the figure of the Woman of the Novelists.

Now, if this man never believes that his wife is a bad wife he will yet pick up certain little salient peculiarities. He will not believe that any given manifestation of unreasonableness is a part of the real character of his Di Vernon; he will regard it as an accidental, as what Myers called a supra-liminal, exhibition, just as when he himself, having travelled first class with a third-class ticket, neglects to pay the excess fare. It is not the sort of thing he would do, it is only what by accident he has done. He remains honest and upright in spite of it. So when his wife calls him a beast he does not believe that the word "beast" is really a part of the vocabulary of, let us say, Dolly of the "Dolly Dialogues." It is all one with his excess fare that he carelessly—and it was so unlike him!—neglected to pay.

At the same time a constant aggregation of these little nothings becomes impressed upon his mind. They are the reaction from the Woman of the Novelists. He does not believe that they are part of his individual woman's nature, he cannot quite make them out—so he attributes them to her sex. (If he lived with a man he would not attribute them to this man's sex but he would say it was because poor so-and-so went to Eton instead of Winchester, or because he smokes too much, or because he takes after his parents.)

The woman of the music-hall, in fact—"My wife who won't let me" and "My wife's mother who has come to stay"—this creature is the direct product of à rebours of the Woman of the Novelists. For, if no man really believes that his wife is a woman of the music-hall, he is not so loyal to the wife of his friend Hunter. His own wife was Diana of the Crossways. She still, if she would only be serious for a minute—is Diana of the Crossways. Mrs Hunter, however, is only Mrs Hunter. To Hunter she was once St Catherine of Siena and still is saintly. But our friend catches certain phases of the intercourse of the Hunters; he hears an eloquent discourse of Hunter about the action of the tariff on the iron industry in Canada, he hears this eloquent and learned discourse interrupted by Mrs Hunter's description, let us say of the baby linen of the Prince of the Asturias. He does not know that Mrs Hunter was once St Catherine—is still St Catherine—and, as such, has a right to be more interested in infants than in iron trades. And, just as in the newspapers, crimes are recorded and the normal happenings of life let alone, so a number of irrational, unreasonable, illogical actions of real women become stored in our poor friend's mind. Thus he arrives at his grand question with which he will attempt to stump you, when you ask for a certain little something:

"Why can't you," he asks, "learn to be logical, patient, businesslike, self-restrained?"

"You cannot because of your sex? Then give up talking and try to be the womanly woman."

And by the womanly woman he means the Woman of the Novelists. And if you achieved this impossibility, if you became this quite impossible she, he would still squash you with the unanswerable question:

"What does St Catherine, what on earth does St Catherine of Siena, want with a vote?"

You see this terrible creation, this Woman of the Novelists has you both ways. Man has set her up to do her honour, and you, how foolishly and how easily you have fallen in the trap!—you, women, too, have aided and applauded this setting up of an empty convention. Women are not more illogical than men, but you are quite content as a rule to allow yourselves to be called illogical if only you may be called more subtle. Women are not less honourable than men, but you are quite content to be called less honourable than men if only you may be called long-suffering. In the interests of inflated virtues you have sacrificed the practical efficiencies of life, you are content to be called hysterical, emotional and utterly unworthy of a place in any decently ordered society, in order that you may let men bamboozle themselves into thinking that in other ways you are semi-divine. Well, this has recoiled upon your own heads and now the average man, whilst believing that in certain attributes you are semi-divine, believes that in the practical things of this life you are more incapable—the highest and most nearly divine of you is more incapable of exercising the simplest functions of citizenship than the lazy and incompetent brute who carries home your laundryman's washing. I do not know which of you, woman or novelist, is the more culpable. The novelist, being a lazy brute, has evolved this convenient laboursaving contrivance. You, thinking it would aid you in maintaining an ascendancy over a gross and stupid creature called man, have aided and abetted this crime against the Arts, and the Arts have avenged themselves, the gross and stupid creature has found his account and you are left as the Americans say "in the cart."

Whether there will ever come a reaction, the God Who watches over all to-morrows alone can tell. But you have the matter a great deal in your own hands, for to such an extent is the writer of imaginative literature dependent on your suffrages, that if women only refused to read the works of any writer who unreasonably idealises their sex, such writers must starve to death. For it should be a selfevident proposition that it would be much better for you to be, as a sex, reviled in books. Then men coming to you in real life would find how delightful you actually are, how logical, how sensible, how unemotional, how capable of conducting the affairs of the world. For we are quite sure that you are, at least we are quite sure that you are as capable of conducting them as are men in the bulk. That is all we can conscientiously say and all, we feel confident, that you will demand of us.