ABSTRACT
The most important factor linking the women novelists is their movement however tentative, provisional, and anonymous, from private sphere to public. Their desire to communicate to a public larger than their own families and immediate circles culminates in a female discourse ranging from mild discontent to anger, even rage. Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, most vigorously and determinedly step across the domestic threshold of women's fiction into the "man's world" of "political economy." laissez-faire capitalism, science and medicine, scientific agriculture, architecture, and–yes–the arts. At the end of the nineteenth century, the usually cautiously optimistic, philosophic George Eliot created a vividly destructive, almost self-destructive heroine who is out of control. Jane Austen confined her defense against intruders to the warning of a creaking door. Deirdre David concludes hopefully, "There appears to be one positive aspect of performance in Daniel Deronda, and it lies in Eliot's myth of the artist".
