Men writing women: Male authorship, narrative strategies, and woman's agency in the late-Victorian novel (George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, George Moore)

My dissertation considers the late-Victorian novel in light of the relationships among literary mode, gender, and the marketplace. I examine how four male authors---George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and George Moore---negotiated the late-Victorian market as they wrote "woman-centered" novels and entered a public debate about the cultural status of real-life women. These authors, I argue, not only had to negotiate the influence of literary modes such as French naturalism, Jamesian psychological realism, and the "new realism" (of which some of them were clear proponents) but also liberal-feminist realism, which was predicated on realistic representation of woman's agency in literary works.; As feminist periodicals such as Shafts and The Woman's Herald show, liberal-feminist realism required representation of the difficult conditions women faced living in Victorian culture and the triumphs of some (but not all) women over these difficult cultural conditions. Further, this definition of realism places strong emphasis on the connection between form and content; to triumph over difficult conditions, real-life women needed to assert agency through three methods: consciousness, the spoken word, and physical actions. These methods of asserting agency correspond to three narrative strategies---internal perspective, dialogue, and description of characters' actions. According to the feminist aesthetic of the day, effective literary representations of woman's agency combined these three narrative strategies.; Both directly aware (through their knowledge of feminist reviews of their own work) and indirectly aware (through their knowledge of broader gender issues, such as the role of women in the field of professional authorship) of the criteria for realism set up by liberal-feminist periodicals, Gissing, Hardy, Meredith, and Moore negotiated the requirements of this literary mode in varying degrees. As the individual chapters of my dissertation show, each author made his own decisions about how thoroughly to incorporate the tenets of liberal-feminist realism. Nevertheless, all four authors were subject to similar cultural conditions and, as a result, incorporated this mode at least to some degree. In doing so, these authors helped shape a literary mode specific to the late-nineteenth century, one that acted as a stepping stone from mid-Victorian realism to modernism.