Lilith on the Moors, Lilith on the Floss, Lilith on the Heath

Abstract

Abstract This chapter moves from the urban cityscapes of London and Manchester in Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray to the remote hamlets and country parishes of the Brontës, Eliot, and Hardy. What is new, in the “provincial fiction” genre, is the accentuated role that geographic place plays in the unfolding drama of the heroine’s desire to flee. From the windswept moorlands of the Brontës’ Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847), and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) to the stark heathlands of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) to the river that runs through George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860), remote English landscapes of Victorian provincial novels reflect and sometimes contribute to the inner turmoil of their strong-willed runaway heroines.