Nice Girl's Don't (But Want To): Work Ethic Conflicts and Conundrums in Mrs. Molesworth's Books for Girls

Constructs and Conflicts

A profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill all my faculties, I have long felt essential to me, I have always longed for. But why, oh my God, cannot I be satisfied with the life which satisfies so many people? Why am I starving, desperate, diseased on it?

Florence Nightingale, private note (c. 1851)

There is a restless desire to "do good," which leads many to look abroad into the wide field of misery, and to overlook the opportunities of usefulness which lie at their own threshold...Lavish upon your home affection, attention, unselfishness, and banish from it every morbid feeling, all craving for excitement, remembering always that

The trivial round, the common task
Will furnish all we want to ask:
Room to deny ourselves a road
To bring us daily nearer God.

The Girl's Home Companion (1891)

Mrs. Molesworth embodies all the conundrums of the Victorian work ethic. By the time she died in 1921, she had written over one hundred books and had been acclaimed as the most popular and successful children's writer of her day. ¹ She wrote partly because she was an instinctive storyteller, and partly because writing was an escape from an unhappy marriage. But principally she wrote to earn money. Separated from her husband, Mrs. Molesworth was the sole breadwinner for herself and their five children. She liked to live well, and managed to have a fashionable social life, and to house, clothe and launch her family in style by working furiously. Throughout her career, from 1870 until 1911, she published several books every year, as well as countless articles and poems; she wrote long after she said she was too old or too ill to write. She wanted to "sell well, even after I am dead"; anything, anything to earn more money.

Yet her books spell out a work message of caution and restraint. Even though her heroines, like their creator, long for work, she never lets them emulate her own success and independence in the workplace. These heroines, unmarried and in their twenties, live under the parental roof. They know their ambition ought to be confined to the domestic sphere, but their longing for a different kind of fulfillment becomes a struggle between convention and new goals for women. Mrs. Molesworth's life and books are a useful springboard from which to examine the female work ethic, first because of the contrast between her experience and her message, and second because the books themselves sympathetically unpack the anomalous Victorian attitude towards women's work. The books highlight the paradoxes implicit in middle-class Victorian values. Mrs. Molesworth analyzes each conflicting norm in the plight of late nineteenth-century middle-class girls—the appeal of work, the dangers of lack of occupation, the statistical "surplus" of girls that made earning a necessity, ² the need to keep caste and the duty to honor the feminine code. This essay intends to show how the Victorian female work ethic is a maze of contradiction and confusion in which noblesse oblige, ambition and penury are equally significant.

Throughout this article I shall refer to Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth as Mrs. Molesworth, a polite, though academically archaic, form of address. I believe that individuals from another age can only be judged fairly, not by our own experiences, but by our efforts in understanding the codes and the tenets of their time. This usage underlines and pays tribute to Mrs. Molesworth's respect for convention. In this she typified her class and age. She was firmly middle-class, every inch a lady, and wrote about respectable middle-class families. She believed in social progress, in which talent could break through humble beginnings, but she was also a stickler for tradition and etiquette as the safeguards of advancement. In another conundrum, the Victorians believed in social change, while simultaneously passionately upholding rules of class. To refer to a woman by her...