In her very brief career as a published writer in 1850, Helen Macfarlane (1818–61) seems to stand apart from other middle-class women writers of her day in the strength of her political commitment to socialism and the fierce radicalism of the articles she wrote mainly for the Democratic Review and, under the pen name of Howard Morton, for the Red Republican. She also produced the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto for the latter journal in November 1850. Nevertheless, in drawing on her knowledge of languages and displaying a wide range of learning, her writing has elements in common with that of her female contemporaries; by exploring its affinities with the work of Eliza Lynn Linton (1822–98) and George Eliot (1819–80), this chapter aims to relocate Helen Macfarlane in a wider literary context than that of campaigning journalism.

I begin by returning to an article I wrote for Gustav Klaus’s first collection of essays, The Socialist Novel in Britain (1982), since, in focusing on the period between Chartism and the 1880s (pp. 26–44), it dealt in part with a novel by Eliza Lynn Linton, The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist (1872), which has surprising ideological affinities with Macfarlane’s writings of 1850. In 1848 Lynn Linton became the first woman to draw a regular salary as a journalist when she was taken on by the Morning Chronicle and in 1850 she met Marian Evans, the future George Eliot, when both of them were, like Helen Macfarlane, young women from the provinces who had come to London to make a living by the pen. Much later, long after Eliot’s death, Linton left an account of that first meeting which mocked the future novelist as looking ‘underbred and provincial’ (Linton, 1899, p. 95) and was equally dismissive of the famous figure she became in later life, as someone suffused with self-importance. This could be attributed to jealousy of a more successful writer, but the description is also characteristic of Linton in its iconoclasm. She was always inclined to knock idols off their pedestals, without showing any ideological consistency in her choice of targets. In the same year, 1854, she could publish both an eloquent celebration of the achievement of Mary Wollstonecraft in the English Republic – a journal edited by her future husband W.J. Linton, the Chartist and republican wood-engraver and writer – and also ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Women’, an attack on women’s emancipation in Dickens’s Household Words (Anderson, 1989, p. 137). It was typical of her that, although she had led an emancipated and independent life herself, she achieved her greatest notoriety by campaigning against women’s emancipation in the conservative Saturday Review in the 1860s and 1870s.

It is possible that her association with W.J. Linton helped bring out the socially and politically radical potential of her iconoclastic nature, but her early novel Realities (1851), written before she had got to know him, already contains an attack on the callousness of the Church and an association of Christ with communism that are to feature in The True History of Joshua Davidson (Anderson, 1987, p. 60). First published anonymously in 1872 in response to news of the Paris Commune, this proved to be the most successful of her novels, going within three months into a third edition in which she acknowledged her authorship (Layard, pp. 179–80). It is the story, told by a friend, of a Cornish carpenter who tries to lead a life such as Christ might have led had he been born in the nineteenth century. Convinced that a modern Christ would be a politician opposed to class society, he breaks with the established Church, ‘this jewelled, ornate, exclusive Ecclesiastical Christianity, who is the ancient Pharisee revived’ (Linton, 1872, p. 57), goes to London and works philanthropically among the poor. He joins the International Working Men’s Association as one of its earliest members in the belief that only concerted working-class action could bring about necessary social change, and, as soon as the Commune is declared, he goes to Paris to help in the cause of humanity. He survives its violent suppression and returns to England, only to be beaten to death by a mob – enraged by the words of a reactionary clergyman – when he attempts to give a lecture on the Communism of Christ and his apostles.

Enlisting Christ and his teachings in the cause of democracy and in the attack on the iniquities of class-society and its hypocritical defender, the established Church, seems directly to echo Helen Macfarlane’s writings just over twenty years earlier in the Democratic Review and the Red Republican. Macfarlane had experienced the temporary success of revolutionary action at first hand in Vienna in March 1848, where she enjoyed precisely the ‘universal tumbling of imposters and impostures into the street’ that Carlyle had lamented (Black, p. 4), and, had she lived, she would surely have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Paris Commune in 1871. Her fierce articles of 1850 attack the same targets and advance many of the same arguments as Linton’s novel, where they are put in the mouth of the compassionate and eloquent Joshua. Macfarlane points out how the Church receives ‘ten to twelve millions a year of national property’ while its ‘priests read prayers and discourse on theological dogmas, to well-fed, well-dressed persons, chiefly of the middle and higher classes’, while neglecting to preach the gospel to the poor or to breathe any criticism of a modern society based on the anti-Christian principle of selfishness, ‘with its two great ramifications of despotism and mammon-worship’ (Black, p. 13). Linton who, as the daughter of a conservative Church of England clergyman and granddaughter of a bishop, had intimate knowledge of the state Church, embodies this priesthood and its failings in the figure of the reactionary cleric Mr Grand, who ‘had no love for the poor, and no pity: he always called them “the common people” and spoke of them disdainfully, as if they were different creatures from the gentry’ (Linton, 1872, p. 35). When Joshua, after Grand has stopped in his new ‘pair-horse phaeton’ to ask why he had not seen him in church recently, respectfully but firmly declares that ‘the Church is but the old priesthood as it existed in the days of our Lord’ and that ‘I see no sacrifice of the world, no brotherhood with the poor’ (p. 38). To this declaration the clergyman reacts with an angry assertion of class superiority and contempt: ‘And you would like us to associate with you as equals? – Is that it, Joshua? Gentlemen and common men hob-and-nob together, and no distinctions made? You to ride in our carriages, and perhaps marry our daughters?’ (p. 40). He ends the exchange by threatening to take the whip to the importunate carpenter’s son, at which the mild Joshua loses his temper and resorts to invective as powerful as Macfarlane’s polemics:

‘God shall smite thee, thou whited wall!’ he cried with vehemence. ‘Is this your boasted leadership of souls? – this your learned solving of difficulties? – this your fatherly guidance of your flock? “Feed my lambs” – with what? With stones for bread – with insult for sincerity – with the gentleman’s disdain for the poor thought of the artisan – with class insolence for spiritual difficulties! Of a surety, Christ has to come again to repeat the work which you priests and churches have destroyed and made of no effect, and to strip you of your ill-used power.’ (pp. 42–3)

Macfarlane makes a similar case against the established Church in general terms, expressing her disgust

at seeing priests of Baal, professing the religion of fraternity, standing up in pulpits and audaciously blaspheming this holy idea. Professing it with their lips, reading it aloud at altars, while their whole lives give it the lie; while they defend a social system which is based on the principle that one man, or one class, has a right to enslave and trample on another. (Black, p. 85)

The novelist, for her part, gives the priest of Baal a local habitation and a name, and she channels the disgust he and his kind arouse through the character of Joshua, whose anger at the overbearing clerical defender of the class system is expressed in language which draws similarly on the Bible and attains a comparable rhetorical power to Macfarlane’s.

Both writers use the example of Christ and his teachings to argue the cause of democracy and advance the progress of socialism (or what Joshua terms communism), and they do so in closely comparable terms. When Joshua sets out the creed he has developed to his friends, his words often seem to carry a direct echo of Helen Macfarlane’s. His pleas, ‘Let us then strip our Christianity of all the mythology, the fetichism that has grown about it’, ‘let us go back to the MAN, and carry on His work in its essential spirit in the direction suited to our times and social conditions’, and his insistence that ‘Christianity is not a creed as dogmatised by churches, but an organization having politics for its means and the equalization of classes as its end’ (Linton, 1872, p. 83), chime with Macfarlane’s assertion that ‘Modern democracy is a Christianity manifested in a form adapted to the wants of the present age, it is Christianity divested of its mythological envelope’ (Black, p. 7). Moreover, Joshua’s reference to Christ as ‘the MAN’ here recalls Macfarlane’s practice of not usually referring to him as Christ but using descriptive phrases that stress his human nature and lowly social status, such as ‘the Galilean carpenter’s son’ or ‘the crucified Nazarean proletarian’ (pp. 6, 9).

Eliza Lynn Linton was never as revolutionary as Helen Macfarlane and her republican hero Joshua only calls for ‘a thorough reorganisation of society’ (Linton, 1872, p. 144) rather than full-blooded revolution, but both writers were more outspokenly radical than the more cautious and conservative George Eliot. As a young woman, Marian Evans, as she was then called, may have welcomed the revolutions of 1848 with a degree of radical fervour in a letter to her friend John Sibree, but she never thought a revolution in Britain either likely or even desirable (Eliot, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 253–4), and she became more obviously conservative in her later years. In relation to the ‘woman question’, however, she retained her radical edge in ways that set her apart from Linton. It is noticeable that the principal female figure in Joshua Davidson – the young woman Mary Prinsep – is a subordinate and largely passive figure. She is rescued by Joshua from prostitution after she had been abandoned by the man who first seduced her, and becomes a loyal housekeeper to Joshua and the narrator of the novel. She accompanies them to Paris only to die a violent death at the hands of the anti-communard mob when she is wrongly taken to be a pétroleuse (female incendiary). This miserable end confirms her status as essentially a victim, and at no point in her short life does she display any of the rebellious energy and independence of spirit of George Eliot’s young women, such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss.

Indeed, Linton’s limitations as a novelist can be seen in her handling of character in general: Joshua Davidson is in this respect more of a polemical tract than a successful novel, and the characters remain representative types rather than being brought vividly to life as individualised men and women with their own distinctive modes of expression, as Eliot’s characters regularly are. However powerful Joshua’s verbal assault on Mr Grand may be, it is delivered in the language of the practised preacher rather than that of a poorly educated Cornish working man. There is no sense of a local idiom or the inflection of a particular class or trade that would root the character in his time and place and social position. What is lacking can be illustrated by comparison with another scene of class confrontation, this time in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, where the tenant-farmer’s wife Mrs Poyser turns on their penny-pinching landlord Squire Donnithorne when he is keen to hand some of their land to a new tenant. She puts him to flight with a series of earthily expressed home truths:

I should like to see if there’s another tenant besides Poyser as ’ud put up wi’ never having a bit o’ repairs done till a place tumbles down – and not then, on’y wi’ begging and praying, and having to pay half – and being strung up wi’ rent as it’s much if he gets enough out o’ the land to pay, for all he’s put his own money into the ground beforehand. See if you’ll to get a stranger to lead such a life here as that: a maggot must be born i’ the rotten cheese to like it, I reckon. (Eliot, [1859] 1996, p. 348)

The radical element in George Eliot comes to light in the action and characters of her fiction rather than through any political statement or overt engagement.

The similarities in the intellectual lives of George Eliot and Helen Macfarlane do not involve politics – beyond their enthusiasm for the revolutions of 1848 – but revolve mainly around their knowledge of German. Both read German literature, engaged with German philosophy and translated German works into English. Before she became George Eliot, Marian Evans published her translation of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined anonymously in 1846, and then, under her own name, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity in 1854. Helen Macfarlane produced the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto for the Red Republican in November 1850, while her articles for the Democratic Review earlier that year contain her own translation of passages from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Black and Watson, pp. 19–20). Her knowledge of German was not confined to philosophers. She concludes her article, ‘Signs of the Times: Red Stockings versus Lawn Sleeves’, The Friend of the People (December 1850), with a sketch of the society to which she aspires: ‘A society, such indeed as the world has never yet seen – not only of free men, but of free women; a society of equally holy, equally blessed gods’; and, as David Black has pointed out, she is drawing here on an essay by Heinrich Heine, ‘The New Pantheism’ (Black, p. 110). George Eliot also knew Heine’s work well, writing four articles on him in 1855–6, the longest of which, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ in the Westminster Review in January 1856, is a survey of his life and work which was instrumental in introducing the poet to the English-speaking world (Essays, p. 216). In that essay she refers to Heine’s pantheistic phase in which he ‘attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being’ (p. 243), indicating that she had read the same text as Macfarlane; but where Macfarlane seems simply to recruit Heine as a fellow partisan in the cause of an ideal republican future, George Eliot is more aware of, and more sympathetic to, Heine’s sceptical reservations about revolution, arguing that he had ‘too keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations ever to become a thorough-going partisan’ despite ‘a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency’ (Essays, pp. 238–9). Despite the interests and abilities the two writers had in common, the difference here points to the distance between the committed republican polemicist and the sceptical future novelist.

Macfarlane’s concluding sentence in ‘Signs of the Times’ with its italicised emphasis on a society of ‘free women’ (Black, p. 110), reveals a concern for women’s rights that is not otherwise prominent in her writings under the male pseudonym of ‘Howard Morton’. When writing for the Democratic Review under her own name, she inveighed against ‘the position of women, who are regarded by the law not as persons but as things, and placed in the same category as children and the insane’ (Black, p. 19). Her glimpse of a future society where men and women could consort on equal terms would have won approval from George Eliot, who, in her 1855 essay on ‘Madame de Sablé: Woman in France’, praised the French salons of the seventeenth century precisely for being places where women were ‘admitted to a common fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men’, which, she insisted, ‘must ever be the essential condition of true womanly culture and of true social well-being’ (Essays, p. 80). Moreover, both women in the early 1850s were making their way in the predominantly masculine world of journals and journalism on equal terms with men – the future George Eliot effectively editing the Westminster Review for John Chapman, who was wise enough to defer to her superior ability, and Helen Macfarlane writing for George Julian Harney as a regular contributor to his short-lived journals and winning the acclaim of Karl Marx as a ‘rara avis’ with truly ‘original ideas’ (Black, p. i). Since they were both moving in radical intellectual circles in the same part of London, it is quite possible that their paths crossed, though there is no evidence that they ever met.

In 1852 their lives took different turns: while George Eliot was editing the Westminster Review for Chapman in the Strand, Helen Macfarlane, who had married a Belgian, Francis Proust, in late 1851, gave birth to a daughter and in 1852 set off for South Africa with her – but without her husband who seems to have started the journey but was detained in England by illness – to settle in Natal. A few days after their arrival in Durban, in March 1853, the baby daughter died. Macfarlane stayed on for fifteen months, returning to England in September 1854 by which time Francis Proust, too, had died. She moved in with her sister Agnes in Manchester and at some stage made the acquaintance of an Anglican clergyman, Revd John Wilkinson Edwards, who seems to have had radical sympathies. In 1856 she married him and had two sons before dying prematurely of bronchitis at the age of forty-one on 29 March 1860 (Black, pp. xxix–xxxii). Ending her life as the wife of a country vicar in Cheshire is an apparently ironic conclusion for a writer who attacked the Church of England so vigorously and cogently in her polemical writings of 1850, but it may well be that the Christianity she and her husband practised in the parish of Baddiley was closer to the teachings of ‘the crucified Nazarean proletarian’ than those ‘state priests’ she mocked, who ‘pocket all the wages they can get, cry out for more, and leave the work to take care of itself’ (Black, pp. 9, 15).

This pattern of rebellion giving way to apparent conformity has a parallel in the life of George Eliot who, after creating a scandal by going off to Germany with the already married G.H. Lewes and then living with him for the rest of his life as ‘Mrs Lewes’, achieved respectability in the final year of her life: after Lewes’s death she married in church the much younger John Cross. But in general the novelist’s life was far less dramatic than Macfarlane’s. When the latter was experiencing the revolutions of 1848 at first hand in Vienna, Marian Evans could only read about them in the newspapers in Coventry; and when she did go to Europe in the following year, after her father’s death, she ended up spending a quiet winter of reading and writing in peaceful Geneva with the sympathetic family of the artist François d’Albert Durade. Her later European travels mainly involved either writing in seclusion or sight-seeing and holidaying, often in sleepy German spa towns and villages. Macfarlane’s experiences of childbirth and emigration she could only witness from a distance; she helped to raise Lewes’s sons and watched while two of them emigrated, like Macfarlane, to South Africa with similarly unhappy consequences, both dying prematurely.

It was in the life of the mind that the two writers had most in common. When, in her article for the Democratic Review, Macfarlane writes of how the Christian dogma that Jesus is the incarnation of God reveals ‘the identity of the divine and human nature’ and how this implies the equality of all human beings since ‘this divine nature is common to us all’ (Black, p. 6), she comes close to, and may be drawing on, Feuerbach’s argument in The Essence of Christianity that the incarnation expresses the human nature of God; as George Eliot puts it, ‘the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (that is, an exaltation of the human)’ (Letters, vol. 6, p. 98). But there are differences of emphasis. In elaborating on the notions of equality and a divine nature common to all, Macfarlane outlines a position that is both ethical and implicitly political:

In virtue of our common nature, we are bound to do to others, as we would they should do to us. This rule is universally valid, without distinction of birth, age, rank, sex, country, colour, cultivation, or the like. Wherever you find a human being, you must consider him a brother and treat him as such. (Black, p. 7)

George Eliot would certainly have agreed with this as an ethical statement although, as a novelist, she tends to avoid absolute assertions of universal validity, always aware of the elusive nature of ‘that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth’ (Eliot, [1860] 1996, p. 456). But the most significant difference lies in the two writers’ relation to Christianity. George Eliot, having renounced her Christian faith in her early twenties while remaining respectful of Christianity as ‘the highest expression of the religious sentiment […] in the history of mankind’ (Letters, vol. 3, p. 231), is more clearly secular than Macfarlane. The earlier part of the sentence cited above about the Feuerbachian idea of god as the expression of a human ideal spells this out: she refers to the conclusion she has reached ‘without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life – namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on what is not man’. Whether Macfarlane shared such an emphatically secular outlook is uncertain, although she would have no doubt assented to the notion of human fellowship as the principle of social and moral development given that fraternity was a central plank of her republican creed. What is difficult to assess is the importance for her of Christianity in its own right rather than as simply a useful rhetorical tool in promoting the cause of democracy. She clearly had a thorough knowledge of the scriptures, not only quoting copiously and cogently from the Bible but also drawing on St Augustine and St Basil as well as St John, while the final stage of her life as the wife of a clergyman indicates that she was never as estranged from the Christian faith as was George Eliot. If, to judge from her writings, her strongest commitment was to the cause of democracy, liberty and a republic of equal citizens, this political faith was clearly supported by her Christian one, the two beliefs being mutually reinforcing. For her, indeed, they appear to have been inextricably connected. She writes of ‘the democratic, or Christian idea’ as if the two terms are interchangeable, and maintains that ‘in the whole civilisation of the human race, there is not a trace of the democratic idea to be found, until the appearance of the Nazarean’ (Black, pp. 12, 13). That event was crucial in her understanding of political history:

I think one of the most astonishing ‘experiences’ in the history of humanity, was the appearance of the democratic idea in the person of a poor despised Jewish proletarian, the Galilean carpenter’s son, who worked – probably at his father’s trade – till he was thirty years of age, and then began to teach this idea, wrapped in parables and figures – to other working men. (Black, p. 8)

When the future George Eliot makes a connection between Christ and working men inspired by a democratic and republican ideal in her letter about the Parisian February revolution in 1848, the inferences to be drawn are rather different:

I would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricade bowing to the image of Christ ‘who first taught fraternity to men.’ One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be something to mar the picture. (Letters, vol. 1, p. 253)

That Marian Evans, no longer a professing Christian, should be so moved by this scene suggests not so much an identification of Christianity with the cause of democracy, even though she concedes its importance for fraternity, but rather the reassuring effect of the sight of conventional Christian piety in the context of revolutionary action with its potential for destructive violence and bloodshed. When she writes that she trembles to find that consoling picture marred, she is clearly prey to the fear of violent disorder that marks so many middle-class reactions to social and political revolution. To such fears Helen Macfarlane seems to have been entirely immune, siding fiercely with the proletarians – ‘my proletarian brothers’ as she repeatedly called them (Black, pp. 19, 93, 106) – whose cause she had embraced so whole-heartedly.

In their response to modern German philosophy there were also differences of emphasis. While Macfarlane may have taken something from the ‘Young Hegelian’ Feuerbach who was so important for George Eliot, her greatest debt was to Hegel himself, whom she termed ‘the last and greatest of modern philosophers’ (Black, pp. 7–8). Her view of history is essentially Hegelian. She sees the ‘Idea of Democracy’ unfolding through four stages: the teaching of ‘the divine Galilean republican’, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, and the ‘Democracy of our own times’ (Black, p. 5); and the next stage will be its practical implementation in the revolutionary reconstruction of society. Even if she does not specifically invoke Hegel’s dialectic in this historical process, the notion of the progressive realisation of an idea is clearly indebted to him, and she cites in its support a passage from his Philosophy of History, in her own translation, in which he describes the emergence of the idea of human freedom from being an ‘undefined feeling’ into the light of full consciousness and acceptance as ‘the source of all jurisprudence’ (Black, pp. 11–12).

The evolutionary dimension of this argument, if not the revolutionary call for the wholesale reconstruction of society which emanates from it, certainly chimes with George Eliot’s view of history; but although she generally held to the notion of what she terms in the finale to Middlemarch ‘the growing good of the world’, she had none of Macfarlane’s fiery confidence in the ultimate inevitability of progress. Her sceptical, questioning intelligence could see that history might be, as she infers from travelling down the valley of the Rhône in The Mill on the Floss, a series of disasters unredeemed by any sense of ‘the onward tendency of human things’ (Eliot, [1860] 1996, pp. 272–3). She was also sceptical of philosophers like Hegel who construct universal systems: reviewing in 1855 a book by the German academic philosopher, Otto Friedrich Gruppe, whom she and Lewes had met in Berlin, she cited with approval his assertion that the ‘age of systems is passed […]. System is the childhood of philosophy; the manhood of philosophy is investigation’ (Essays, p. 148). She was intellectually opposed to abstract system-building and professions of absolute, unquestioned faith.

To compare George Eliot’s essays with Helen Macfarlane’s is to be struck how different they are in ideology and expression despite the similarly wide reading and erudition they display. Macfarlane’s are marked by a fierce partisanship alien to George Eliot. In their journalism the two writers may sometimes have focused on similar subjects, but in their style and approach and underlying ideology they were poles apart.

Had she lived, Helen Macfarlane would have surely approved of Eliza Lynn Linton’s Joshua Davidson, but would doubtless have dismissed her ‘Girl of the Period’ essays as a frivolous distraction from the pressing need to fight for democratic social change. Dying four days before the publication of The Mill on the Floss in 1860, she could only have read George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859), had she been inclined to. Recently married to a Church of England vicar, she might have been attracted by the title of Scenes of Clerical Life, but had she read the stories, George Eliot’s treatment of an evangelical preacher and two Anglican clergymen with no radical sympathies might well have struck her as altogether too understanding and sympathetic for a class of men she regarded primarily as hypocritical supporters of an iniquitous social system. Her own deployment of Christ’s example and teachings in the cause of a democratic and socialist re-shaping of class society might seem to ally her with Christian Socialists like Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice, but she never refers to Christian Socialism directly, and when she mentions the journal associated with the movement, The Leader (one of whose founders was George Eliot’s partner G.H. Lewes), it is only to cite their critical description of writers in the Red Republican as ‘violent, audacious, and wrathfully earnest’ while whole-heartedly embracing those epithets and wrapping herself proudly in their mantle (Black, pp. 55–6). This was entirely compatible with her version of Christianity since Christ, for her, was the angry proletarian revolutionary who scourged the moneylenders from the temple.

How interested she was in contemporary fiction is unknown. The only novelist she mentions in her essays is Dickens, whom she refers to as Mr Boz, and she shows direct knowledge only of his journalism, dismissing him and his kind as ‘rosewater political sentimentalists’ (Black, p. 54). When she goes on to condemn middle-class charity as ‘atrocious, inhuman humbug’, she would seem, by implication, to condemn Dickens the novelist as well as the social reformer. From this evidence she might have had little time for George Eliot’s fiction, especially the later, more clearly conservative work which she did not live to see, like Felix Holt, the Radical (1865). In the one novel by George Eliot she might have read, Adam Bede (1859), class society is certainly taken as given, but the tensions and resentments, and indeed the suffering, that it causes are not glossed over but vividly dramatised in scenes like the confrontation between Mrs Poyser and the Squire cited earlier, and the dairymaid Hetty Sorrel’s solitary ordeal when she discovers she is pregnant by the Squire’s grandson. The novelist deals not in denunciation and polemical agitation for revolutionary change, but in a realistic rendering of the social world that does not shrink from criticism; and, in its implications, her fiction can be far more radical and questioning of the social status quo than the views she expresses in her letters and essays. It is, indeed, in the light of her probing fiction rather than her statements in essays and letters that it is possible to argue that, had she and Helen Macfarlane ever met, they might have engaged in a fruitful dialogue of similarly powerful intellects and equally matched eloquence, as is ingeniously imagined in a recent play (Hoyle).

As it is, the writings of these three women authors set up their own dialogues, sometimes chiming with each other but more often reverberating with the friction generated by different views of the same mid-nineteenth-century world. These visions confront, challenge, and interrogate each other. All three writers were pioneers in their own way, women of the middle class who took radical and adventurous steps to make a distinctive impact in a profession, and a society, dominated by men. Helen Macfarlane stands out as the one whose radicalism was clearly and consistently political, even revolutionary, but, since her extant writings were confined to a period of less than a year, the brevity of her career as a writer leaves many questions unanswered, especially about the course her work might have taken had she enjoyed the opportunities afforded by a longer life.