Women writers were expected to write the kinds of novel which George Eliot was condemn in an essay as Silly Novels by Lady Novelists -the sub genres of romance, fantasy and sensation. But several of the major figures of the Victorian novel are women; and the heroines they created began to throw off the victim's role that male authors had created, from Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa onwards. Jane Eyre's 'Reader, I married him' close to the end of Charlotte Bronte's novel (1847) that bears the character's name, shows the reversal of roles and the decision-making capacities that the new generation of socially aware women could demonstrate.
On the whole, Dicken's women are not well portrayed; but from Trollope to Thomas Hardy and Henry James, a desire to present fully rounded and complex female characters can be traced. George Eliot (née Mary Ann Evans) took a male partly in order to rise above the 'silly novels' syndrome, but such writers as Elizabeth Gaskell and the Bronte sisters had already made a notable contribution to the flourishing of female writing in mid-century.
The Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, not only contributed much to growth of the novel, but also to the position of women at this time. They did much to alter the way in which women were viewed, demonstrating new social, psychological and emotional possibilities for women. Like George Eliot, however, they adopted pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell) in order not to draw attention to the fact that they were women. Charlotte and Emily Bronte are in may ways both opposites to Jane Austine. They are districtly romantic in temperament, exploring in their novels extremes of passion and violence. Although there are some features of Romanticism in Jane Austen's novels, her work is essentially Augustan in spirit. She prefers exploration of the individual wit in clear boundaries of decorum and restraint.