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J. RUSSELL PERKIN Locking George Sand in the Attic: Female Passion and Domestic Realism in the Victorian Novel The artists also are idealists, Too absolute for naturel logical To austerity in the application of The special theory, - not a soul content To paint a crooked pollard and an ass, As the English will because they find it so And like it somehow. I (Browning, Aurora Leigh. 6:104-10) George Sand's fiction was widely read in England in the nineteenth centuryl perhaps more widely than that of any other foreign author of note. AB Patricia Thomson notes, although Sand's 'influence on the Victorian reading public and, more importantlYI on Victorian writers was enormous ... it has now been almost completely forgotten' 0). Today Sand is known most often for the details of her personal life (recently the subject of the rather fanciful movie Impromptu), though there has been something of a renaissance of critical interest among scholars of French literarure, and there have been two studies of her influence on Victorian literature.! However, it seems that the effects of these studies have not been fully assimilated by students of English literature, judging by the relative scarcity of references to Sand in criticism of major Victorian writers. Henry James wrote an essay on Sand after her death in 1877, describing her as 'the great writer who shared with Victor Hugo the honour of literary pre-eminence in France' (708). James makes a perceptive comparison between Sand's fiction and the English novel: Miss Austen and Sir Walter Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, Hawthorne and George Eliot, have all represented young people in love with each other; but no one of them has, to the best of our recollection, described anything that can be called a passion - put it into motion before us and shown us its various paces. To say this is to say at the same time that these writers have spared us much that we consider disagreeable, and that George Sand has not spared us; but it UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1994 GEORGE SAND AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 409 is to say furthermore that few persons would resort to English prose fiction for any information concerning the ardent forces of the heart - for any ideas upon them. It is George Sand's merit that she has given us ideas upon them - that she has enlarged the novel-reader's conception of them and proved herself in all that relates to them an authority. This is a great deal. From this standpoint Miss Austen, Walter Scott and Dickens will appear to have omitted the erotic sentiment altogether. (724) This quotation offers a useful starting place for an examination of the relationship between female passion and the domestic novel, which I will consider here by following the varied fortunes of Sand's influence on a series of writers in the 1840s and 1850s. As Barrett Browning suggests in the passage referring to French art which I have used as an epigraph, the English attachment to realism precluded statements of extremes; James notes this, and characteristically manages to praise George Sand at the same time as he notes that she has not spared us much that is disagreeable . Jameshimself is a partial heir to the domestic compromise which was effected in the Victorian novel, and he is not noted for his immediately apparent 'ideas' concerning the 'ardent forces of the heart,' but he was also aware of the absence of such ideas among the major novelists of Victorian England. I will explore the compromise that repressed such concerns, and will focus on a series of texts, beginning with Sand's early feminist novel Indiana and proceeding to look at aspects of novels by Geraldine Jewsbury, Charlotte Bronte, Dinah Mulock, and George Eliot. First, however, it may be helpful to consider the reception of Sand's texts in England. II The friendship of Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Carlyle was commemorated in one of Virginia Woolf's less well known essays. According to Woolf, 'sympathies and antipathies bound the two women together with an elasticity that made for permanence. The tie between them could stretch and stretch indefinitely without...

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