Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

""She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces.""

Silly Novels By Lady Novelists is an essay written by George Eliot in 1856, in which she skewers so many Common Mary Sue Traits it's amazing — everything from her beautiful singing voice to her hordes of admirers to her astounding intellect.

While the essay seems to mostly skewers Mary Sue Tropes and several people qualify it as an early example of sporking, the actual target of the essay are both the Strictly Formula nature of the fiction written by other female authors of her era (most of their output being the XIX century predecessors of Harlequin and Mills and Boons novels) and how the very low quality of those novels keep alive the notion that female authors are shallow and uninspired and their books are silly romances of no transcendence. It also skewers how many of these authors use the Starving Artist myth to protect themselves of criticism.

A copy of the essay can be read in the Source tab above. Please blue shift it accordingly


 * Altum Videtur: many Silly Novelist throw it to make their heroines intelligent and instructed.
 * Aristocrats Are Evil
 * Author Tract: the full essay, but also the novels of evangelical persuasion.
 * The Beautiful Elite
 * Beauty Is Never Tarnished
 * Blue Blood
 * Curse
 * Dances and Balls
 * Deathbed Confession
 * Death of the Hypotenuse
 * Designated Hero
 * Did Not Do the Research
 * Dude in Distress
 * Duel to the Death
 * Easy Evangelism
 * Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry
 * Genius Book Club
 * Gilded Cage
 * Historical Fiction
 * Improbable Age
 * Informed Ability: Particularly the intellect of the Silly Novels heroines.
 * Little Professor Dialog
 * Long-Lost Relative
 * Love Dodecahedron
 * Made a Slave
 * Mary Sue
 * Canon Sue: All the works are technically original fiction.
 * Melodrama
 * Moral Myopia
 * Nice Guy: The designated hero of the Evangelical white neck-cloth species.
 * Omniglot
 * Owl Be Damned
 * Parental Marriage Veto
 * Period Piece
 * Pimped-Out Dress
 * Purple Prose
 * Rags to Royalty
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
 * Shallow Love Interest
 * Virgin Power
 * Wrong Guy First