In her monumental new book, A Jury of Her Peers, published this week, the distinguished American literary critic Elaine Showalter ponders the tricky question of why 19th-century America produced no great female novelists, while Britain boasted an abundance. Where, she wants to know, is the Yankee Eliot, the Virginian Austen, the mid-western version of the Brontës?
In part answer to her own rhetorical question, Showalter suggests that it may come down to domestic arrangements. "While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the south, white women in slave-holding families were trained in domestic arts." In other words, while women in the New World collapsed into bed at night after a drudging 18-hour shift, their British counterparts were able to spend several leisured hours a day honing their literary skills.
This is to misunderstand what servant-keeping entailed for ordinary British households in the middle years of Victoria's reign, the decades that saw the publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Adam Bede. Put out of your mind any lingering memory of Upstairs, Downstairs, the 1970s television drama set in a wealthy Edwardian household. While the fictional Bellamy family enjoyed the services of a fleet of servants, from the omnipotent butler Hudson to the kitchen skivvy Ruby,the typical middle-class family of 50 years earlier muddled through with one, perhaps two maids-of-all-work. And, far from lolling in the drawing room whilst other, working-class, women did all the hard work, the mistress of the middle-class household was most likely to be cooking and cleaning alongside her servants. In the days before vacuum cleaners, washing machines and fridges, the daily battle against soot, bedbugs, candle grease and mouldy food was one that lasted pretty much all day and required every hand on deck.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the Brontës. In 1839 Charlotte wrote wearily to an old schoolfriend, "I manage the ironing, and keep the rooms clean; Emily does the baking, and attends to the kitchen." True, there was an elderly female servant, Tabby Ackroyd, who had been at the parsonage for years, but her increasing frailty made her more of a hindrance than a help. Brontë's first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, describes one occasion when Charlotte was obliged to re-peel some potatoes that the nearly blind Tabby had left in a mangled state. The only Brontë who was excused domestic duties was Branwell, the feckless son who drank himself to an early death without managing to make a single mark on the literary or artistic world.
The same case could be made for George Eliot, whose life until she was 30 was defined by an endless round of domestic care. On her mother's death she was removed abruptly from school and expected to run every aspect of her father's Warwickshire farmhouse. It was said that in later life her right hand remained slightly larger than her left, the result of so much time spent churning butter in the dairy during her formative years. Marathon jam-making sessions left her so frazzled that, on occasions, she was left barely able to hold a pen and was obliged to apologise to her correspondents for her shaky script.
Even talented girls from wealthy British homes, the equivalent of Showalter's "white women in slave-holding families", were expected to put household duties before personal inclination. Young Florence Nightingale fretted that she would go mad from the endless domestic duties she was required to pursue in her family's well-staffed homes. Only Elizabeth Barrett, daughter of a prosperous West Indian plantation owner, managed to wriggle out of the customary obligations of an unmarried eldest daughter. Even then, her strategy for obtaining the free pass – invalidism – brought with it a stern requirement from her doctors that she should put aside her poetry and concentrate on drinking health-giving porter instead.
Arguing away the differences between the daily experiences and expectations of American and British women won't, of course, get you any nearer to answering Showalter's excellent question. Just why did Victorian Britain produce so many great female novelists while their American sisters remained stuttering and even mute? Vague and reductive arguments about differences in national "character" won't do, as Showalter would be the first to admit. There must be something else. But what that is remains a mystery. One thing, though, is certain: it wasn't lack of housework.
