ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Six women novelists–Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Eliot–in an attempt to demonstrate the relationship between the self-reflexive novel and the emerging female text and voice. It focuses on the complex relationship between Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth. If the putative heroine is "silenced," Deronda seems to be an androgynous hero whose first name may link him to Shakespeare's Portia in The Merchant of Venice, disguised as a male lawyer, and greeted by Shylock as a "wise young judge. A Daniel comes to judgment." The book examines the ramifications and impact of the novelists and their heroines on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It discusses Austen's Emma and Eliot's Dorothea Brooke as female would-be artists whose attempts at creativity are "silenced” or thwarted by their environment and their own shortcomings.
