The Powerful Woman in America and Europe

Book excerpt: The nineteenth-century writers such as George Eliot opened the eyes of Englishmen and Europeans to their own history with their historical romances. Ivanhoe and Kenilworth, for example, are imaginative reconstructions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Many readers, however, think that certain novelists are at their best in their handling of their minority stories. Later writers followed the brilliant example of the idealistic novelist Dickens, who wrote A Tale of Two Cities and others. Today historical romances are a popular kind of fiction. Witness the large number of American novels that deal with our own past. George EliotMary Anne Evansagitated the other followers of literature to write in more frank and truthful pedagogical learning. This a way for D. H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad to write to people in a pedagogical way, and because of this, we do not understand immediately what is going on in the novels of D. H. Lawrence. But Virginia Woolf preferred the intelligent readersthose who have the ability to think deeply after reading cautiously. She was the leading novelist in the stream of consciousness technique made popular after World War I. When we read works by the novelists D. H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, we feel that their goal is to write about women as great and productive in every society.