Introduction: 19th C English Women Novelists and their Impact

Abstract

The lives and works of a galaxy of women novelists who were born in the second decade of the 19^th century like Elizabeth Gaskell in 1810, Charlotte Bronte in 1816, Emily Bronte in 1818, George Eliot in 1819 and Anne Bronte in 1820 deserve to be remembered and revisited. They pioneered, in the history of fiction, introducing, developing and nurturing new themes and attitudes in it, particularly, themes pertaining to women and their issues and their attitudes as well as the attitudes of the society to them.  In spite of their short lives, they have left a rich legacy of what was virtually non-existent in England before them i.e in women’s fiction. Virginia Woolf, commenting on the 19^th Century fiction, writes in A Room of One’s Own that the woman becomes much more various and complicated in fiction. These women novelists have made the greatest contribution in the direction of constructing such a varied and complex image of the woman. They fashioned remarkably the female Bildungsroman in English literature.