ABSTRACT
Naturalism and the New Realism, two of the main areas of fictional innovation in the late nineteenth century, were in some ways attempts to masculinise the novel. 18 From George Henry Lewes’s ironic complaints about ‘the melancholy fact … that the group of female authors is becoming every year more multitudinous and more successful’ (1850:189), and George Eliot’s satiric diatribe against ‘Silly novels by lady novelists’ (1856), to George Moore’s animadversions on the power of the circulating libraries (1885), and Edmund Gosse’s on the ‘tyranny of the novel’ (1892), writers and critics (male and female) complained about the dominance of women as producers and consumers of fiction, and of feminine concerns in the novel.
