Rhoda Broughton - Works

Works

Somerset Maugham, in his short story "The Round Dozen" (1924, also known as "The Ardent Bigamist") observes: "I remember Miss Broughton telling me once that when she was young people said her books were fast and when she was old they said they were slow, and it was very hard since she had written exactly the same sort of book for forty years".

Rhoda Broughton never married, and some critics assume that a disappointed attachment was the impulse that made her try her pen instead of some other literary work like that of Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie. Much of her life she spent with her sister Mrs. Eleanor Newcome until the latter's death in Richmond in 1895. She therefore somehow stands in the tradition of great lady novelists like Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen or Susan Ferrier. But there are other merits that cause her to be placed in such high company. In his article on her Richard C. Tobias calls her " the leading woman novelist in England between the death of George Eliot and the beginning of Virginia Woolf's career." He compares her work with other novelists of the time and concludes that hers reaches a much higher quality. Indeed her works of the 1890s and the early 20th century are fine novels and good fun to read.

The Game and the Candle (1899) is like Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) rewritten. Only this time the heroine has married for rational reasons and is freed in the beginning for her true love, which reason forbade her to marry years before. Her dying husband's last will forces her to decide between love and fortune. In the renewed encounter with her former lover, she, however, is forced to discover that it was actually a good thing she had not married him. His love turns to be too shallow for her happiness. The novel is one of a mature and wise woman who has seen the world. In A Beginner (1894) Broughton devices a young writer who has her work secretly published and then later torn apart by unknowing people right in front of her face. The novel deals with the moral issues of writing and whether it is appropriate for a young woman to write romantic or even erotic fiction. Scylla or Charybdis? (1895) has a mother hiding her infamous past from her son and obsessing about his love even to the extent of being jealous of other women, a plot slightly anticipating Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913). The novel questions social conventions in its revealing how destructive they can be to quiet people who might have once stepped aside from the proper path. In a different way the same criticism is being made in Foes in Law (1900), where the main question is which lifestyle is the one productive of the highest degree of happiness: the one according to convention or that according to one's own private needs. Her next novel, Dear Faustina (1897), deals with a heroine that is drawn to a girl of the New Woman type. This New Woman Faustina cares nothing for social conventions and dedicates her time to fight social injustice. Or so it seems at least at first sight, however, the reader gets the feeling that Faustina is more interested in getting to know and impressing other young women. That can also be interpreted as criticism of the New Woman. The homoerotic touch reappears in Lavinia (1902), but this time it is a young man who is frequently made to appear unmanly and even uttering the wish to have been born rather a woman. That novel also concerns itself with Britain's craze about war heroes. Very subtly it questions dominant notions of masculinity. Always a very important feature in every of her novels is the criticism of woman's role and position in society. Very often Broughton's women are strong characters and with them she manages to subvert traditional images of femininity. This culminates in A Waif's Progress (1905), in which Broughton creates a married couple who turns everything traditional upside down and the wife fulfills the stereotypes of an older, rich husband.

During her lifetime Broughton was one of the Queens of the Circulating Libraries. Her fame and success was such, that some found it worthwhle to satirise her in works like "Groweth Down Like A Toadstool" or "Gone Wrong" by "Miss Rody Dendron." It is a pity we do not know how she took such things. Perhaps she stood up to them as she did to people like Oscar Wilde or Lewis Carroll, who bore her no love. The latter is said to have declined an invitation because Broughton would be present. The former found a match in her when it came to ironical comments in Oxford society, where she was not liked much, either, due to her ridicule of that set in her novel Belinda (1883). Nevertheless, she also had many friends in literary circles, the most prominent of them being Henry James, with whom she stayed friends until his death in 1916. According to Helen C. Black, James visited Broughton every evening, when they were both in London.

Today most of her works are out of print and even the original ones are very hard to come by. Especially those published after 1900 are very hard to procure. The most frequently still read are her mysterious short stories.

Her story "The Man with the Nose", narrated from a male viewpoint, is a masterpiece of subtle horror. The story's last sentence, quite innocent in itself, intensifies the horror of all that has previously occurred in this story.