Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 43

MANY proofs of the fact that a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant, might be alleged. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are among novels of ages and countries different from ours. As we approach our own time, women in fiction become more and more interesting, and are of greater consequence than the men in fiction, and the skill with which they are portrayed is more and more a test of mastery. By this test the romantic novel shows its inferiority, if by no other; we have only to compare the work of Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Henry James, Harold Frederic, Mr. George W. Cable, Miss Mary E. Wilkins, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the other realistic or realescent novelists with that of the romanticists, in order to see how vast this inferiority is. If we go outside of our own language, we must note the supremacy of women in the fiction of Goethe, Manzoni, Balzac, Turgenev, Zola, Maupassant, Bjornsen, Valdes, Galdos, Verga, and Sudermann. These masters have presented women livingly, winningly, convincingly as no master of romance has. The greatest exception that occurs to me is, of course, Hawthorne; but even he created his most lifelike woman character, Zenobia, in his most realistic story, "The Blithedale Romance." Women, above all others, should love the fiction which is faithful to life, for no other fiction has paid the homage and done the justice due to women, or recognized their paramount interest.