Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- 1 Sailor and Writer
- 2 Writing as a Woman
- 3 Finding the Sea
- 4 Writing the Sea: Genre and Theme
- 5 Writing the Sea: Women and Gender
- 6 Marketing the Sea: Serials
- 7 Marketing the Sea: Books and Publishers
- William Clark Russell: A Bibliography
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Writing as a Woman
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- 1 Sailor and Writer
- 2 Writing as a Woman
- 3 Finding the Sea
- 4 Writing the Sea: Genre and Theme
- 5 Writing the Sea: Women and Gender
- 6 Marketing the Sea: Serials
- 7 Marketing the Sea: Books and Publishers
- William Clark Russell: A Bibliography
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Shortly after the publication of his first two novels, Russell sparked a brief debate on contemporary fiction in the pages of the London Review. In a letter to the editor on the subject of ‘Poetry and Novels’ published on 8 February 1868, he attributed the ‘present vapid, idle, valueless tone of our fictional literature’ to a poetic influence deriving from Tennyson:
Tennyson is a poet eminently calculated to delight women; and to the influence of his poetry may be unhesitatingly attributed the singular influx of women into the fields of modern literature. Female intellect, by judiciously leavening thought has, I doubt not, an ameliorating effect by introducing an element of refinement that no art can communicate. But that which was at first ameliorating becomes, by superfluity, deteriorating. Art, by too much refinement is emasculated.
The critical sentiments expressed here support the statements Russell later recorded in his 1894 essay in My First Book which is discussed in the Introduction to the present volume. In that essay, writing from the vantage point of more than fifteen years' success as a nautical novelist, he recalled how at the outset of his literary career he was driven to adopt a particular style and content in his fiction by the assumption that the ‘great mass of readers – those who support the circulating libraries – are ladies’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical NovelGender, Genre and the Marketplace, pp. 37 - 58Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014