| OCR Text |
Show My Thoughts Are Not Still 275 young, idealistic Madelyn Stewart: Jane Austen's, Persuasion (originally published in 1818), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72), and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929). In Persuasion, one of the great and most realistic nov els in Western literature, Madelyn was struck with Anne Elliot. Intelligent and amiable, a complex and sensitive character, Anne has a strong Protestant Christian will. She and Captain Frederick Wentworth eventually attain a deep "affection" for each other-a feeling that Austen believed was a more profound and lasting emotion than "love." With an understanding heart, Anne had, in the words of a later critic, an "almost preternatu ral acuteness of perception of others and of self," which attract ed Madelyn. Something like Rosalind in As You Like It by Shakespeare? Anne was a person of inward freedom-a person, as Austen wrote, "whose heart keeps asserting its demand for fulfillment. She was the kind of person that Madelyn hoped she herself was. Like Anne, Madelyn understood the importance of sense of duty, and saw the integrity and peace of her own life as essentially bound to the lives of her husband, her children, her mother (who was still living), her sisters and brothers, and her many friends. Like Austen, Madelyn was conservative and wished to accommodate women's aspirations to their cultural and social milieu. Madelyn felt a pang as she learned that Jane Austen had to write in the common sitting room and hide her work under blotting paper so as not to be discovered." Madelyn had warmed up to George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) because, at an early age, Mary Ann had translated David Friedrich Strauss's Life ofJesus (1846) and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854). She had also been editor in the early 1850s of The Westminister Review, the foremost liberal intel lectual monthly. Mary Ann had begun to write fiction in 1856 as "George Eliot," producing a series of realistic and deeply etched portrayals of English society, whose familial, cultural, and social structures often impeded the liberation of women (and men). Madelyn had read Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, and had been impressed with Eliot's presen tation of the humor and pathos of life, her belief that human tri als have a purifying effect, and her uncanny knowledge of peo- |
