Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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"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

Tropes diagnosed in this essay (not all Mary Sue Tropes, actually):

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