THE MODERN BRITISH 'BILDUNGSROMAN' AND THE WOMAN NOVELIST: DOROTHY RICHARDSON, MAY SINCLAIR, ROSAMOND LEHMANN, ELIZABETH BOWEN, AND DORIS LESSING

The Bildungsroman (variously called the novel of apprenticeship, of initiation, of development, of education, or of adolescence) was especially popular in the period preceding the Great War and continuing through the first half of the twentieth century. Novels like Sons and Lovers, Of Human Bondage, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Look Homeward, Angel, and the many second-rate imitations have led at least one critic to conclude that the twentieth-century Bildungsroman has been solely a "male affair." And yet, there were women writers, like Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, and more recently, Doris Lessing, creating novels which dramatized the young girl's struggles and frustrations as she moved from adolescence to maturity.;A chapter is devoted to each of the five writers. The novels discussed in detail are Richardson's 13-volume Pilgrimage (1915-38), Sinclair's Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927), Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938), and Lessing's 5-volume Children of Violence (1952-69). The female protagonists are shown to follow a pattern of growth that is not markedly different from the one their contemporary male counterparts follow. An outline of such a pattern can be found in Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." In childhood the individual sees everything "apparelled in celestial light." But this vision is soon lost, for "shades of the prison-house begin to close." What then remains is merely the "light of common day." Deeply involved in the "dialogues of business, love, or strife," the maturing individual can, nevertheless, reap some joy from a remembrance of things past. Finally, he or she enters the "season of calm weather," a time of celebration marking the attainment of maturity, This paradigm, used in the discussion of each of the five Bildungsromane written by women, may be used with equal success in examining the growth of either female or male protagonists.;Yet, the female and the male Bildungsroman, though parallel, are not identical. Operating within these novels by Richardson, Sinclair, Lehmann, Bowen, and Lessing is what Virginia Woolf, borrowing from Coventry Patmore, referred to as the "Angel in the House." The Angel, sometimes embodied in a Victorian mother or schoolmistress, and sometimes more vaguely identified as a general pressure to conform, would have women become charming, mindless, self-sacrificing handmaids. Herself plagued by such an Angel, Woolf found it necessary to kill the phantom which repeatedly interfered with her thinking and writing. The female protagonists Miriam Henderson, Mary Olivier, Judith Earle, Portia Quayne, and Martha Quest, while struggling towards maturity, must contend with equally destructive Angels of their own.;Thus, in the modern British Bildunsroman, while the female protagonist is, like her male counterpart, engaged in escaping from her prison-house and in coping with business, love, and strife, she is at the same time trying to fend off the Angel in the House--a creature who would deny her the freedom to mature as a woman and as an artist.;The present study first examines the translations and definitions of the term Bildungsroman, coined by the nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, and then offers a description of the genre in its twentieth-century form. Though Wilhelm Meister may be the prototype, the modern British and American Bildungsroman is by no means a carbon copy of it.