Abstract
‘A woman cannot do a man truthfully from within, any more than one nationality can represent another from within,’ wrote Charlotte M. Yonge in 1892, towards the end of her career as a novelist.’ Her choice of phrase suggests that to her, men were indeed like foreigners, truly the ‘Other’, whom it would be virtually impossible for a woman to depict without sacrificing her own womanliness, and she was astute enough to recognize that many women’s heroes were consequently ‘prigs’. ‘Manly dash’, as she called it, seemed to her beyond a normal woman’s reach, and women writers must simply learn to live with their handicaps and make their heroes less priggish by endowing them with the odd lovable weakness.
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Notes
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© 1996 Valerie Sanders
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Sanders, V. (1996). ‘Goody Men and Brutes’: Heroes. In: Eve’s Renegades. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24935-0_5
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