SOURCE: “Why Political Novels Have Heroines: Sybil, Mary Barton, and Felix Holt” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter, 1985, pp. 126-44.

In the following essay, Yeazell suggests that the narratives of courtship of the Victorian era repress the violence of class conflict and social change.

Beginning with Richardson's beleaguered young women, the history of many an English heroine turns on those critical moments at which she cannot speak until spoken to—which is to say that she is the subject of a courtship plot, and subject to its conventional constraints. Though “her lot is made for her,” as George Eliot succinctly puts it, “by the love she accepts,”¹ a properly modest heroine should do little actively to encourage that love, indeed should think as little as possible about it. The code of feminine behavior, in short, postulates a young woman who is least aggressive, often in...