"The former have more exaltation, perhaps more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in their intellectual activity--less of the 'femme auteur', which was Rousseau's horror in Madame d'Epinay; but the latter have a richer fund of ideas--not more ingenuity, but the materials of an additional century for their ingenuity to work upon."
— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Author
Work Title
Date
1854
Metaphor
"The former have more exaltation, perhaps more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in their intellectual activity--less of the 'femme auteur', which was Rousseau's horror in Madame d'Epinay; but the latter have a richer fund of ideas--not more ingenuity, but the materials of an additional century for their ingenuity to work upon."
Metaphor in Context
A fair comparison between the French women of the seventeenth century and those of the eighteenth would, perhaps, have a balanced result, though it is common to be a partisan on this subject. The former have more exaltation, perhaps more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in their intellectual activity--less of the femme auteur, which was Rousseau's horror in Madame d'Epinay; but the latter have a richer fund of ideas--not more ingenuity, but the materials of an additional century for their ingenuity to work upon. The women of the seventeenth century, when love was on the wane, took to devotion, at first mildly and by halves, as English women take to caps, and finally without compromise; with the women of the eighteenth century, Bossuet and Massillon had given way to Voltaire and Rousseau; and when youth and beauty failed, then they were thrown on their own moral strength.
(p. 46)
(p. 46)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1992). <Essay at ebooks@Adelaide>
Date of Entry
06/10/2011
