"You can choose between the life of a fugitive, and the life of a dog!": The marital prison in Mary Eliza Haweis' A Flame of Fire

Mary Eliza Haweis was a writer and illustrator between 1848 and 1898. At eighteen, Haweis had one of her own paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy and this skill in drawing and painting transferred easily to illustration. Haweis would later illustrate her own works with historically accurate period sketches. It was Haweis’ artistic talents that caught the attention of a suitor, her future husband, the Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis. The meeting between Haweis and her future husband was a pivotal moment not only for her personal life but for her professional one. Hugh Reginald was an author and popular preacher, who had experience within the world of writing and publishing. Haweis was self-taught whereas Hugh Reginald had a formal education, having been to Cambridge, and he seemed to have read her manuscripts and poems. Haweis wrote in a diary entry that he said, “there was so much good in them so much undeveloped power – but they were without form” to which she recorded, “I said I knew nothing about the rules of prose or poetry.” Hugh Reginald gifted her a volume of Emerson’s poetry and Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. Ruskin would go on to be a key figure in Haweis’ aesthetic philosophies, showcased in her works on aesthetic dress and household design. His influence on her identity as a writer is clear, but he should not be given much of the credit. Haweis’ pen was unrelenting, writing in a variety of forms including novel writing, writing for the periodical press, children’s fiction, design and fashion advice, and housekeeping advice. However, this paper will focus upon her novel writing with her only published piece of fiction – A Flame of Fire. New Woman fiction as a genre enabled women to utilise a quote “more detached, less self-revelatory medium for the exploration of controversial, intimate or painful autobiographical matters”

This paper poses the following statement:
The institution of marriage, supported by legislation, eroded away at the identity of Victorian women, and the purpose of Hawes’ novel is to challenge and confront inequalities in the law which saw women struggle for divorce. The institution of marriage, through the use of Gothic imagery, transforms the very real laws surrounding, for example coverture, into imprisonment. The heroine, in her bid to escape an abusive husband, must, as the title of this paper says choose between the life of a fugitive and the life of a dog.