SOURCE: "Transmuting the Commonplace: A Problem of Style," in The Novelist and Mammon: Literary Responses to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 188-208.

In the following excerpt, Russell examines Gore's novels of the 1840s, when she focused on financial issues, and finds her an objective and judicious observer of money in relation to mid-nineteenth-century society.'

Of all nineteenth-century novelists who turned their attention to the City and its doings, [Catherine] Gore was the most faithful to reality, and the best able to solve the problems of presentation caused by the demands of structure, setting, and style. Virtually forgotten today, her works were enormously popular in her own time: such disparate critics as George Eliot and George IV thought highly of her talents. Her success in depicting the financial scene was due partly to her innate ability, and partly to the nature of...