A GREAT DEAL has been written in the last two decades about the literary phenomenon known as the New Woman novel. Criticism has emphasized its breaking of new ground in content and has often seen in it a foreshadowing of modernist techniques.¹

Through this kind of novel, feminist novelists (often also involved in journalism and taking an active part in the movement for the emancipation of women) felt they could effectively convey to a vast number of readers, the unsatisfactory plight of women at the turn of the century. They obviously considered novel reading a means of providing “crucial knowledge, rather than escaping from social realities” (Flint 316). Since they inevitably discussed sexual topics, either to advocate chastity for men (Sarah Grand) or to battle for a greater freedom in the relation of the sexes (Olive Schreiner, Menie Muriel Dowie, Mona Caird, “George Egerton”), their realism, or “new realism,” as it was generally referred to, created great alarm among conservatives, and discussions on the pros and cons, desirability or dangers, extent and limits of such realism, went on in the periodical press for many years.² What it is important to notice here is the fact that writers of New Woman fiction were the butt of abuse and hostile criticism more as women than just as writers, having stepped out of the neatly designed boundaries allowed to the “lady novelist.” As Penny Boumelha puts it, “Women, as writers or as characters, are identified as at once the source and the focus of ‘a problem’” (73).

At the same time as the heated discussion of the role and responsibilities of the woman novelist, novels portraying a woman novelist as their main character were being published in an unprecedented quantity. The reason for this lies in increased publishing opportunities for women;³

thanks to a wider readership, to enterprising publishers, and to the great number of cheap or fashionable periodicals, it became possible for a virtually unknown writer to become famous overnight.⁴ This easier access to authorship and a generalized interest in women's activities, added glamour to the figure of the female novelist, while the debate centering around New Woman novelists must have inevitably sharpened the consciouosness of the disabilities and conditioning a woman author had to face. There is a close link between New Woman novels and novels with a writer as heroine; women novelists in the eighteen-nineties, when writing about their profession, inevitably referred to the “sex problem novel” or “sex novel,” as the novel on the woman question was sometimes called, and even in those cases when they wished to distance themselves from that genre, they would emphasize the difficulties the woman novelist had to face not only as a writer but also as a woman, just as a New Woman novel emphasized the difficulties of ordinary women in ordinary life. Whatever their individual response to specific aspects of the woman question, “women authors of the 1890s were conscious, as their male contemporaries were not, of the restrictions and constrictions of middle-class gender roles as the determining factors in their careers, and they wrote of these circumstances sometimes in anger, sometimes in despair, but almost always – even when they appeared to be resigned to their fates – with the hope in mind of instigating social change” (Stetz 41).

THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER is to show the way in which a novel on a woman novelist, namely A Writer of Books (1898) by “George Paston” [Emily Morse Symonds],⁵

is closely akin in its construction to the feminist novel, so that we can better define it as a novel on the New Woman novelist.⁶ Its author adapts certain characteristics of the New Woman novel to the framework of the Künstlerroman thus creating a novel that constitutes a significant encounter between the social involvement of the feminist novel of the nineties and the primary focus on the writer which was to prevail in the female Künstlerroman of the early decades of the twentieth century.

Compared to a modernist Künstlerroman, the focus in A Writer of Books is not so much on the awakening of the artist's consciousness, as on the later stage, when the writer is searching for the right way to realize her vocation. However it would be limited to describe A Writer of Books as a novel dealing solely with the conflicting roles of woman and writer. While it challenges certain consolidated views of what is expected of a woman novelist, it touches on wider issues of content and narrative mode. It contributes to redefining the woman novelist's position in the modern world by pitting its protagonist against the background of a rapidly changing female reality, and as it advocates a need for change from received tradition, it attempts to tread new paths within its very structure.

Like Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage, this novel also can be said to represent “a significant discursive moment in the transition from the bourgeois domestic subject to a new form of modernist subjectivity shaped, among other things, by modern metropolitan experience” (Parkins 54).

George Paston belongs with those authors who “conceive of their art as an act of political engagement” (Ardis 160). In her novel she does not confine herself to the main theme, the growth and struggles of a would-be young writer, but manages to combine it with a number of problems relating to women; in doing this, she adopts several devices also typical of the New Woman novel. The author had an interest in the woman question and had already written two New Woman novels, A Modern Amazon (1894) and A Study in Prejudices (1895), but in them she had adopted less innovative solutions to the problem of the barriers to her heroine's freedom posed by social convention and male domination. The protagonist of her first novel, for instance, renounces her career as a journalist in favor of marital happiness, a totally different ending from the one to be found in A Writer of Books.

This novel deals with Cosima Chudleigh, a young girl who wants to become a novelist. When, on her father's death, she is left on her own, she moves to London and, given her limited means, she allows herself two years to achieve her goal. Her main purpose in moving to London is to look for material for her books, since she feels she has already mastered style but, because of her restricted life, has no ideas for her stories. Once in London, the heroine settles in a boarding house and meets several people, has her first novel published, and gets married to a childhood friend. Disappointed by her marriage, she falls in love with a historian, nearly decides to leave her unworthy husband to live with him, but in the end drops both of them to concentrate solely on her writing vocation.

In A Writer of Books the heroine takes the stance of a sympathetic but slightly detached observer of women's attempt to secure control of their own lives – when asked if she shares her sex's “desire to hasten evolution” she declares:

This statement may sound disconcerting in the light of the general thrust of the book; Paston's heroine's attitude is diametrically opposite to “Sarah Grand”'s Beth, who begins her career as a novelist but feels impelled by a sense of duty to other women, to give it up and use her gift with words as an orator at feminist meetings. Authorship there becomes a means to an end: as a friend tells Beth, it has helped “to perfect you in some other form of expression” (The Beth Book 521). Teresa Mangum has interpreted Grand's renunciation of the “woman artist” plot as meaning that “an artist motivated by a feminist ethic must inevitably do more than simply make room for women in society or in publishing; she must also use her knowledge, and in Beth's case, her gift with words, to transform that world. As a speaker, Beth fulfills this third objective” (61). Paston sees her priorities differently; she obviously considers that novel-writing can become a sufficiently effective political act in itself. What the heroine most likely means here, is that she doesn't wish to become involved outside her chosen province of literature. By emphasizing the undoubtedly great appeal that a time of change and unrest holds for her writer heroine, the author reasserts the centrality of her role as novelist, her social function to describe and – if by implication – to criticize the times.

The style of the statement itself – the Shakespearean reference, the almost Wildesque wit of juxtaposing high-sounding and mundane words (millennium/dull), sets the tone of the whole novel, stressing an undercurrent of sophisticated irony that comes to the surface in many passages. In this sense A Writer of Books differs from the majority of New Woman novels, where the urgency of the polemic might result in a grim, plaintive, or aggressive tone. It is as if Paston wants to show that it is possible to deal with serious issues without losing one's sense of humor, and she creates a clever, witty, endearing if somewhat naïve heroine able to utter cutting remarks as effective as any feminist harangue. One cannot help remembering Arnold Bennett's comment on Emily Morse Symonds: she “exhibits a good-humoured railing tolerance for all ‘missions,’ including her own” (Journals 1: 51).

Like the majority of late-Victorian feminist novels, A Writer of Books opens on the early youth of its main character. In New Woman novels the main purpose of this is to show the exceptional quality of the heroine's temper and the slow forming of her awareness of society's unjust organization regarding men and women; in this way the pity and waste of the subsequent disillusion and of the thwarting of all aspirations to give free scope to her personality are also emphasized. In A Writer of Books the author uses the child Cosima's early vocation to narrate stories, which take the form of intricate romances, as an opportunity to satirize a certain kind of fiction: “In like manner does the grown-up romancer, who has made a hit with a detective or a pirate or a Scotch minister, seek to gratify an admiring public with innumerable replicas of its favourite character” (3). In this way the author takes part in the strong polemic against romance that runs through most New Woman novels; romance reinforced female roles that New Women authors refused to endorse; romance was an essential component of that Victorian tradition in fiction that they considered obsolete and dangerous, blinding young woman readers to the realities of life and perpetuating a system of ignorance and submission.

In Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1897), Beth's passion, as a child, for pleasantly sounding words is depicted, as well as her first efforts in poetry; in her adult life, though, she turns to prose and her last work is not even fiction. There is in general in these works, a movement away from poetry to prose, from romance to realism, mirroring a parallel movement in life from illusion to facts. It is also possible to detect such progress in the heroine's reading preferences, as if poetry were associated with pure pleasure, and prose – most notably serious prose – with possibilities of changing one's outlook on life and improving existing conditions. The protagonist of Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) changes her early reading of The Ancient Mariner and Wuthering Heights for Emile and the Contract Social. In her writing career she will struggle to free herself from the demands of the popular press for escapism and romance, in a vain attempt to achieve her ideal of a novel depicting “things as they are” (186).

Escapist reading was often seen as stemming from an inadequate education for women, a recurring topic in New Woman novels. Cosima, a librarian's daughter, is luckier in this regard than the majority of New Woman heroines who have to fend for themselves against a conservative educational establishment: her father, though ready to give Mrs. Braddon's or Mrs. Henry Wood's saccharine shockers to any shop-girl asking for “a nice novel,” is progressive enough to recognize the shortcomings of traditional girls' schools and to offer her “the food for which her mind craved” (13).⁷

No schooling can be better than bad schooling as in the case of Sarah Grand's Beth:

The great opposition between romance and real life, between misleading novels and improving literature, is hammered at over and over again. The argument is old enough and in the past it was used to warn girls that unchecked novel reading could enflame their imagination and lead them to commit imprudences. But in the last decade of the century the argument worked both ways; conservatives used it against realistic novels:

Advocates of the modern school of writing on the other hand, found that an excess of reticence could be just as immoral:

Novels only too often offer their female readers a distorted view of life; just as a New Woman must learn at her own expense where the truth lies, so a New Womannovelist must try to see life for herself in order to depict it. If Cosima's first story is a romance, already as an adolescent she realizes that life does not always rise to the expectations aroused by books. Invited to local parties, she is miserably disappointed: “Everything was so unlike what she had expected. In books parties sound so delightful; the heroine almost invariably made a sensation, and either met her fate in the person of the hero, or at least struck up a life-long friendship with the most charming girl in the room” (10) and later on, when she gets engaged, “How little in common was there between her present feeling of shrinking resignation and the blissful abandonment in like circumstances of the heroines of romance” (155).

Cosima plans to be a novelist and she seeks experience, convinced that without experience in diverse ways of life she is not going to find the material for her stories. London is the best place to find what she is looking for. On arrival she still has some difficulty in distinguishing between fiction and reality, “finding it almost impossible to realise that this tired, lonely, frightened girl was really she, and not some heroine of romance, whose adventures she was reading” (15).

In the New Woman novel, different aspects of the woman question were often introduced through a multiplicity of plots or characters. Often the main plot is supported by a sub-plot and the two present two kinds of woman, one “new,” the other traditional, one rebellious and one a victim, or one crushed by and another coming to terms with her condition.⁸

When female characters acting as foils to the heroine do not rise to the dignity of a story of their own we still find them inserted into the main stream of the novel in order to illustrate some point. Other favorite themes were: the inequality of man and wife before the law, the excessive power of fathers over children, the virtual impossibility for a woman to obtain a divorce, the ruin of “innocent-ignorant” girls brought about by husbands “with a past,” the excessive demands of enforced maternity, and the plight of single women not equipped to get themselves a living.

In A Writer of Books the inventory of female disabilities and complaints is extended beyond the boundaries of the domestic sphere; old prejudices concerning women writers, like the one that “slovenliness is the natural correlative of a love of letters,” (33) are denounced, as is sexual harrassment at work (an actress, friend of Cosima, has to keep at bay the manager's avances without at the same time risking the loss of her job); a friend points out to Cosima that even the British Library catalogue confirms sexual inequality referring respectively to both surnames and pseudonyms in the case of men writers, but omitting cross references to a woman writer's married and maiden name.

The pattern of growth, discovery, disappointment, and frustration referred to above, is adapted in A Writer of Books to the necessities of the story of the artist and any social criticism the author wishes to make is justified by the device of the heroine's search for “something to write about” (41). A number of feminist issues come up during this search, providing a natural context for the reflexions of a young girl at her first experience of town life and so avoiding the strained, ideologically dense dialogues that often mar the novels of Sarah Grand and others. For instance, the limitations of a woman's life are shown to hamper a would-be novelist: “How difficult, how almost impossible it was, she reflected sadly, for what is called a ‘respectable young woman,’ the product of an almost conventual system of education, to gain the knowledge and experience which are necessary for success in the art of fiction” (43). Later on, seeing women gazing at the fineries in elegant shop-windows, arouses Cosima's socialist awareness. She writes in her diary: “I am haunted by the recollection of those poor creatures, gazing with hungry, hopeless longing at embroidered blouses and feathered hats, like starving wretches outside an expensive restaurant” (33).

Choosing a London boarding house as a milieu gives George Paston the opportunity of collecting a wider range of female types than the ones generally presented in a New Woman novel. Cosima comes across a woman doctor, a woman journalist, and also a poor woman of the old type whose baby son has been taken away from her by the husband who wishes to give him a more virile upbringing. Our heroine is a sort of innocent onlooker and her vision constitutes an effective criticism of a distorted system that can give an undeserving father absolute power over his children. Whatever Cosima is learning about real life, “at present it doesn't seem to me a very edifying branch of knowledge” (69). The total freedom from family links allows Cosima a degree of unconventionality thanks to which the author can throw a few stabs at certain attitudes toward the relation of the sexes. At a time when “Neither men nor women of the middle classes were brought up to relate to one another outside a social-sexual context” (Burstyn 130), Cosima accepts an invitation to a restaurant from a total stranger, out of curiosity to study the young man “and, as a scientific spectator, to see something of a phase of life which is mostly shuttered off with jealous care from the knowledge of the girl from whom the wife is bred, as distinct from the girl from whom the social scapegoat is bred” (53). A similar wish had caused Angelica to dress as a boy (Grand 1893) and Mary Earle to complain “How it spoils everything this eternal question of sex. It was almost impossible for a woman to see a man as he really is” (Hepworth Dixon 258).

The problem aroused interest also in less advanced circles:

The constraint was felt by young men as well; Cosima's stranger, though quite at a loss on what category to assign her to (having accepted his invitation can she be “altogether straight”?), complains about the boredom of an all-male company to which gentlemen of his class resort in order to avoid the danger of being taken for possible suitors.¹⁰

Besides references to her boarding house mates' personal stories (the mother deprived of her child, who goes mad after his death; the struggles of the woman journalist to gain and keep a decent job; the difficulties of a lady who writes children's stories), there is in the novel a story within the story, narrated by one of the secondary female characters, Bess, an actress with whom Cosima strikes up a friendship. Bess is the type of the femme fatale by conscious choice and she explains that this is her way to revenge wronged women in general and her mother in particular, who was seduced at sixteen by a false marriage; this same mother in later years had contrived a similar destiny for her seducer's legitimate daughter by encouraging her to elope with a Frenchman. The character of Bess is followed through to an extent nearly amounting to a parallel plot; she embodies an extremely hostile attitude to men, bringing a suitor to the end of his tether in order to revenge a girl who had committed suicide for his sake. When the suitor assaults her, she stabs him and is acquitted not so much on grounds of self-defence as owing to the bias of the jury caused by her beauty.

This sounds very much like melodrama verging on that romance the author strongly objects to, and, conscious of having created a character open to the charge of being unrealistically overdrawn, Paston uses Cosima's musings on Bess to distance herself: “A monomaniac, and yet on all points save one, perfectly rational and unusually intelligent. She is, I suppose, one of the results of the re-action of her sex against the injustices of past ages” (83). Probably for the same reason, elsewhere she has Bess say: “I could tell you stories that all the critics would condemn as unnatural and improbable if you put them into your books” (59).

Paston's deliberate justification for her episodic relapse from realism takes on an extra significance if we read it at a more general level, since it might apply to the occasional forcing of verisimilitude in which, despite their proclaimed fidelity to real life, most New Woman novelists incurred, in their eagerness to prove their point. One typical aspect of this is the almost exclusive focus on a central “exceptional” female character, that goes with a tendency to overlook psychological nuances in the male point of view and to draw male characters in two neatly distinct types that could be classed as “the Good guys” and “the Bad guys”; husbands invariably belong to the latter category because they are corrupt¹¹

or egocentric uncomprehending brutes.¹² At the same time most New Woman novels feature a sympathetic man who appears to show concern and genuine interest for the woman question and is generally endowed with a hightened sensitivity and a modern attitude towards women. This could be an attempt to introduce a fictional embodiment of the New Man advocated by Olive Schreiner,¹³ but it could also arise from a wish to avoid the charge of haranguing which always lay in wait for the feminist novelist, by transferring the function of authorial comment to a supposedly dispassionate observer.¹⁴

A Writer of Books presents the same dichotomy in male characters, but being the story of a woman writer, the literary and the sentimental narrative strands are closely intertwined, and conservatism is embodied not only in the heroine's husband but also in the characters of a publisher and a literary critic.

The initiation into “real life” of most fictional New Women is through marriage; marriage is the great stumbling block of all juvenile illusions, and also in some cases the beginning of a new awareness of one's dignity as an individual; life is no romance in these novels' badly assorted marriages. First of all, the heroine has no real choice since she is given no opportunity to know her future husband more than superficially. Often her choice is prompted by familial and economic pressures, or by a mistaken hope of gaining independence. In a few cases marriage appears as the outcome of a sort of ingrained feeling that it is woman's inescapable destiny.¹⁵

Viola's father, in Mona Caird's The Wing of Azrael, reminds her that a woman who does not marry “is a cumberer of the ground, a devourer of others' substance, a failure, a wheel that won't turn” (143).

In A Writer of Books Cosima accepts Tom's proposal because she feels lonely but she is also prompted by the curiosity for an experience “practically indispensable to a novelist” (147). She shares with some of her New Women fictional sisters a degree of squeamishness and sexual reticence;¹⁶

after her engagement she thinks that “a lover would be a much more desirable acquisition if he would only refrain from making love” (155); on her wedding day her husband appears to her “like an amiable ogre who was assisting in the preparation of some favourite dish” (185). Images of brides associated to sacrificial rites are very frequent in New Woman novels,¹⁷ but here the author makes it quite clear that she does not endorse Cosima's view of things and she distances herself from her heroine at the beginning of the sentence quoted above: “He looked, to her distorted vision” (emphasis added). Paston makes it also quite clear that sexual reluctance is not ingrained in Cosima's nature, since, when she feels free to aknowledge her love to a man who is not her husband, she affirms “what do I care for being degraded in the eyes of the world? I only want a little love, a little happiness, before everything comes to an end for ever” (327).

If Cosima's choice of a husband has been guided by a novelist's wish to widen her field of experience (“He was the first man who had made genuine love to her, and the experience was much too valuable to be lost” [14]), post-marital disappointment gives the heroine the impression that marriage “had deadened or destroyed her literary faculty” (189). The faults of Cosima's husband are nothing macroscopic like drunkness or wife-beating; nevertheless he is far from her in character and culture. His false joviality, bad manners, and petty avarice make everyday life with him unpleasant enough, but it is his lack of cultural interests of any kind that makes this marriage a failure. Tom has no literary refinement and his tastes in reading are on the same line with those of people who “don't care about all that – what d'ye call it? – analysis, and if you want to make money you should write a historical romance with lots of fighting in it, or something in the supernatural line” (276–77).

The role of lover and mentor then goes to Quentin Mallory, a historian whom Cosima meets in the Reading Room of the British Museum. A Writer of Books is a mine of remarks and information on the situation of publishing for women. Cosima's earnings, on a “half-profits agreement” amount to a pittance; moreover, publishers are always ready to impose their own views on her work and she has to put up with plenty of this sort of advice: “Cut out all the dissertations and all the dialogue that doesn't advance the action of the story, and – and, oh yes, just make it end happily, please” (106). George Paston obviously doesn't share this view, and in the manner of most New Woman novels, uses dialogue to convey her meaning; since what she is discussing here is the role of the woman writer and the concept of realism, these are the main topics of conversation between her heroine and Mallory.

When starting in her profession Cosima feels her lack of experience as “one immense disqualification” (42) and compares unfavorably her life with those of Balzac, Flaubert, the De Goncourt brothers, the Daudets, who “had drunk deep of the cup of life, and wrote of that they did know” (42). Mallory will help her to put the value of “first hand experience” into the right perspective. Referring to the French naturalistic approach, he tells her “It is of no use going out to hunt experience with a gun. You may kill and stuff your experience, but you'll never deceive anybody into thinking that it is the real live animal” (171). Through Mallory, the author reveals her opinion of the debate over realism which had occupied British writers and critics for the last decade.¹⁸

She comes to the conclusion that the mere scientific observation of the French naturalist writers is not sufficient to produce a masterpiece, but that a really good book needs “A human heart and a human life, melted down to blood and tears, and cast into the ink-pot; that is the only recipe for a great romance” (170).

But the issue of realism in general is linked here to the other much debated issue of the scope of a woman writer's experience, in answer to which Paston attempts to work out a theory of the correct relation between factual information and imaginative power. In the course of the novel Cosima progresses from a concept of “experience” as something to be acquired by coming in contact with the wide world, and as such still mainly a man's prerogative, to the realization that her own “individual sensations and experiences” may act as “the sun and the rain that fertilise one's mind” (171). The search for experience in the first meaning turns out to be illusory and dangerous, leading Cosima to view people as potential sources for “copy” (“It was typical of her training and turn of mind that people should interest her rather as character-studies, or incarnate novels, than as human beings” [25]) and eventually to her mistaken marriage; to this the novel opposes a revaluation of female “experience,” woman's private lore of feeling and emotions, that, transfigured beyond any direct autobiographical use, becomes an authentic source of creative power.

Mallory encourages Cosima to get rid of the influence of other books and exhorts her “to give us not only more of yourself but also more of your womanhood” (192) in her next book, so breaking away from the tradition of subservience to male standards in the novel:

The above mentioned duality in male characters, is replicated in the field of literary criticism. In her boarding-house Cosima meets a literary critic, the epitome of conservatism and hypocrisy; he gets sentimental over Dickens but leaves his wife and children penniless and the reader is informed that he “shared the old-fashioned prejudice against literary ladies as a class, though when individually they were young and pretty he was prepared to forgive them everything, even success” (29–30). Predictably, he suggests that Cosima should write love-stories (“You should write about love as you know it. There is a reaction just now in favour of healthy human sentiment” [71]). Not surprisingly he “can't stand the psychological, analytical, problem and sex novels” (30); Cosima replies to this dismissive labelling, common among hostile critics:

In the preface to The Wing of Azrael, Mona Caird had answered with a similar argument against the accusations generally levelled at “novels with a purpose” – “disproportion” in focus and “distortion” of reality.²⁰

She claimed that if by “purpose” it is meant a predetermined thesis that must be illustrated by the novel, the latter “has no real right to the name” (vii). The imposition of the author's view on her characters would clash with their possibilities of independent development. On the other hand, each author must inevitably offer a personal selection and interpretation of the facts of life, “for in the heart of each man lies a recorded drama, sternly without purpose, yet more impressive and inevitable in its teaching than the most purposeful novel ever written.

To transcribe this invisible world so that the impress becomes revealed, is to write a novel” (ix). Having easily dismissed the kind of conservative criticism quoted above, Cosima is no less disappointed in the superficial reactions to the publication of her first novel. Instead of the hoped-for useful and constructive criticism, she discovers that reviewers go to opposite excesses of praise or severity when dealing with a first work.²¹

Only at the end of the novel do we get a glimpse of what could be called “the New Critic,” one whose criticism “to the honest writer is at once help, a stimulus, a salutary discipline and an exceeding great reward. Generously appreciative and keenly discriminating, it was at the same time mercilessly just” (340). But this happens only after Cosima has at last found her own way to novel writing and has learnt to disregard the publishers' and the public's demands and to write only “to please herself ”²² (272):

This definition points towards a modernist conception of personality, a view that still retains what seems worth preserving in recent fictional heritage. The naturalist's interest in the influence of environment is seen as a check on the excessive emphasis on feeling typical of the English tradition; at the same time the Bildungsroman Cosima describes must involve a lot more than just a stress on the senses; thoughts, feelings, and senses must have an equal share in this novel that, interestingly enough, can be significant even if it is only a “part of a biography”; but perhaps most interesting of all is the modern anticipation of the centrality of individual experience as opposed to the overwhelming role society had played in Victorian fiction.

A Writer of Books can be seen as the epitome of the change in the approach to writing by fin-de-siècle women novelists. Paston does not have recourse to concealed plots in order to narrate her heroine's impatience with male literary dominance, and her rebellion soon comes to the surface. Throughout the novel, for instance, the notion is stressed that writing is as much a profession as a vocation, and that an adequate economic return is essential to carry it out. The first sign that Cosima does not belong to the generation of women writers affected by what Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar call “the anxiety of authorship”²³

(49) comes in a dialogue with the conservative critic in the boarding house. To his surprise she affirms openly and proudly her intention to become a writer without resorting to the usual self-deprecating formulas like “writing a little” or “scribbling nonsense” (29) expected of women. She may still be insecure of how to go about her business, (and to show her quest for identity as a writer is Paston's purpose), but she definitely represents a step towards an independent female literary tradition. Significantly, the start of her writing career is marked by a move from the seclusion of her sheltered provincial life to the open space of London's streets and other public places hitherto off-limits to the respectable heroine (hospitals, music-halls, restaurants, even the Embankment by night). Apart from the obvious fact that London was the place to go to if one was looking for publishing opportunities, there is undoubtedly an emphasis in A Writer of Books on the deliverance from the confinement to the domestic sphere which the previous generation of women writers had so keenly felt. Cosima's growing refusal of both male conforming feminine roles and traditional narrative conventions mirrors a similar refusal on the part of her creator, on the level of narrative strategy, which leads to an unexpected resolution of the romantic plot.

The distance between the author and her heroine undergoes a similar evolution. Although the expectations of young Cosima are still conditioned by the male-dominated literary market, the author presents them with a degree of ironic distancing in showing the young woman looking for experience as if it were a marketable item: “I mean to try and do big things…. I've done my best to learn how to write. What I want now is something to write about” (41). The very mode of presentation of Cosima's musings leaves no doubt as to how to interpret them. The harsh reality of her straitened circumstances appears at first to her as clothed with romantic glamor (“A period of real privation, nights spent on the Embankment, furtive visits to the pawnbrokers, these experiences seemed to be among the most effectual fertilisers of literary genius” [17]). On her first visit to a publisher she is almost worried at the possibility that her work can be immediately accepted:

As the novel proceeds and the heroine exchanges her youthful inexperience for hard learnt facts, the ironic distance between author and protagonist closes. The fact that the mature Cosima has learned not to compromise, receives her creator's unequivocal support.

The consciousness of a distinctive quality of female experience requiring adequate expression is further emphasized when Paston has a man expounding on the need to break free of male artistic tutelage. The choice of a male character to convey such an outspoken message (see note 19)²⁴

may be interpreted as a wishful anticipation of a future change in attitude towards women writers or as a desire to give more authority to the message; but the fact remains that the message itself is quite revolutionary, and there is a premonition of Virginia Woolf in the statement that if “the thoughts of woman are buried in her grave” the fault attaches to man, but “prejudices never go unpunished and the penalty of the prejudice is that we have lost half the history of the human race” (192).

NOVELISTS OF THE “NEW REALISM” particularly disliked the happy endings demanded by the reading public and linked to conservative ideologies of sex, love, and gender. The persistence of such ideologies gave New Woman writers, in particular, little cause for rejoicing. Thus, it is frequent to find these novels ending with the heroine's defeat, desolate loneliness, or death. In the few cases that a new marital happiness is hinted at, it is clear that previous experience has wrecked all romantic illusions. In this respect, A Writer of Books is highly original: it rejects the conventional happy ending, without at the same time leaving us with a martyr or a frustrated heroine.²⁵

When the “romance plot” appears to be on the brink of fulfillment, with Cosima given a just cause to abandon her husband and willing to go to Mallory, the author opts for a third possibility and makes her heroine, encouraged by an appreciative review of her last novel, decide to devote herself only to her writing career:

Netta Syrett's Nobody's Fault had depicted a similar situation, with her heroine airing typical New Woman's views on the brink of going to live with her lover after leaving her husband (“marriage is only a marriage so long as there is love and tenderness on both sides” [227]). But in the end she gives up her happiness because it would go against her nature to gain it by hurting her mother. Syrett's woman novelist achieves success but she has a grim view of her future: “I shall be merely a bad tempered, irritable, middle-aged person” (250).

Similarly, the writer protagonist of the Story of a Modern Woman, who refuses to elope with her former fiancé on grounds of feminine solidarity with his present wife, will not find compensation in her work, since she is described as facing the future of “a moral starveling, whose natural instincts were to be pinched, repressed” (228). Sarah Grand on the other hand, after having her character, Beth, leave her husband and make her way on the speaker's platform, cannot renounce romance altogether and closes her novel on a final glimpse of a potential lover, a choice that makes Rachel Blau Du Plessis affirm that “Most of the nineteenth-century works with female artists as heroes observe the pieties, putting their final emphasis on the woman, not the genius; the narratives are lacerated with conflicts between femininity and ambition” (87).

Paston's heroine is happily devoid of a family, and she does not feel bound by any loyalty to a husband who had tried to be unfaithful to her (“I no longer have a husband – I am free to follow my own inclinations. If the law doesn't allow me to dissolve my marriage, why then I'll be a law unto myself” [325]).

In the end Cosima appears to renounce sexual fulfillment more as a result of her disappointment with a certain timidity of Mallory's, who is only too ready to remind her of the difficult plight she will find herself in as his mistress, than because she is convinced by her lover's world-wise arguments. What can be deduced correctly enough is that Paston's choice for her finale is determined by a deliberate search for a solution different both from the traditional “romance plot” and from the prevailing New Woman fiction's pessimistic endings. Similarly, in the metanarrative Cosima must look for a third way to express herself different from both the love story the critic expects of her and the alternative of writing “like a man.”²⁶

Mallory's double role of lover and mentor then, stops short: he functions within the “woman writer” narrative strand but finds no place as soon as Paston decides to drop the two possibilities offered by the “sentimental” plot strand. She renounces the traditional happy ending for the story of a woman's life in favor of a happy ending in the public sphere: the success of Cosima's novel.

A Writer of Books is grouped by Peter Keating with novels that deal with the exposure of literary commercialism in which the artist is often forced to compromise; this compromise represents “failure, the collapse of ambitions, an inability to nurture the stoical personal resolve and lofty disregard of commercialism that were now regarded as the serious artist's indispensable qualities” (84). True as this may be as far as the exposure of literary commercialism is concerned, I do not feel A Writer of Books ends on a note of failure.

The rejection of the traditional happy ending as far as Cosima the woman is concerned does not extend itself to the writer's life, and we are left with the image of the heroine already planning her next book, which, we have every reason to believe, will be a success: