Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
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"She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces." |
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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 look intelligent and instructed.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: Eliot makes fun on how this trope is overused, and that frequently the villains are "evil baronets".
- Author Tract: the full essay, but also (allegedly) the novels of oracular and Eeangelical persuasion.
- The Beautiful Elite: Whom the Silly Novels tend to portrait.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished
- Blue Blood
- Curse
- Dances and Balls: Eliot mocks the excessive frequency of these.
- Deathbed Confession
- Death of the Hypotenuse
- Designated Hero:
- Did Not Do the Research: Mocked thoroughly the text.
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The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. ... If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness. |
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- Dude in Distress
- Duel to the Death
- Easy Evangelism: Elliot mocks how the heroines in the Silly Novels of oracular and evangelical dispositions are able to convert even the unwilling.
- Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry
- Genius Book Club: According to Eliot, the "intelligent" heroines all have read the same books that were considered the mark of intelligence at the time, mostly the Greek and Roman classics like Virgil, Livy and Horace.
- Gilded Cage: In the opinion of Eliot, both the heroines of Silly Novels and the Lady Novelist who wrote them live in these.
- Historical Fiction: one of the "oracular" novels Eliot describes allegely takes place in a Medieval era
- Improbable Age: Along with the example mocked in Little Professor Dialog below, many heroines are portrayed as being extremely educated before being 18.
- Informed Ability: Particularly the intellect of the Silly Novels heroines.
- Little Professor Dialog: Elliot quotes a particularly egregious example where a 4 and a half year-old kid dispenses a Purple Prose filled discourse, and how ridiculous it actually sounds.
- Long-Lost Relative
- Love Dodecahedron: Eliot mocks the frequency the protagonist of these silly novels are embroiled in onde of these
- Made a Slave
- Mary Sue
- Canon Sue: All the works are technically original fiction.
- Melodrama: The mark of being a Silly Novel by a Lady Novelist.
- Moral Myopia
- Nice Guy: The designated hero of the Evangelical white neck-cloth species.
- Omniglot A frequent trait of these heroines. Eliot mock one of these thus:
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Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline. |
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- Owl Be Damned
- Parental Marriage Veto
- Period Piece
- Pimped-Out Dress
- Purple Prose
- Rags to Royalty
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
- Shallow Love Interest
- Starving Artist: discussed: while people may believe that the Lady Novelists that author Silly Novels were destitute women (who become writers as an alternative to become a governess, the only other "acceptable" female profession of the era) and excuse their faults under the belief that those are written by barely educated ladies trying to bring bread to their families, Eliot points out that, given how deeply inaccurate their portrayal of the low class is compared on how sightly inaccurate the one of the high class views are, that such silly novels are more probably written by middle and high class ladies with nothing better to do with their time.
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It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. |
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- Virgin Power
- Wrong Guy First: the stereotypical plot of a Silly Novel