ABSTRACT
Mabel’s fl ippant remark, in Ethel Heddle’s Three Girls in a Flat, that “a rich man can always be endured,” would not be out of place in a Jane Austen novel, but in a Victorian novel for girls it sets her apart from the other characters. The heroine of a Victorian novel is romantic not because she dreams of love but because she rejects the materialism that sees marriage as a business arrangement and friendship in terms of social climbing. Even the world of business is romantic in comparison. Nevertheless, the novels do typically conclude, as feminist critics have noted, with marriage providing the happy ending. As we have already discussed, marriage for girls fi lls the same function that work does for boys, marking off adulthood in terms of adult roles and duties and in terms of a materialism that is in marked contrast with the romantic idealism that defi nes the space of adolescence. At the same time, marriage also, of course, for girls as for boys, defi nes adulthood in terms of adult sexuality and is for girls, as it is for boys, the return home that gives the romance genre its circular form. While the deferral of marriage opens up adolescence as a romantic space for girls, at the same time it can be understood also in terms of sacrifi ce, as the heroine gives up the comforts that marriage would provide in order to make her own way in the world or, often, to support other members of her family.
