Describe the subject-matter of novels Europe.

(i) Novels are written about ordinary people and their life.
(ii) After industrialisation, many changes took place in the lives of the people and the unemployment in the cities. Novelists such as Charles Dickens wrote about effects of industrialisation on people’s lives in his novel ‘Hard Times’ in which humans became simple instruments of production to earn more profit. Thus, he focused on the terrible conditions of urban life under industrial capitalism. His fictitious town – Cohetown – is a place full of machinery smoking chimney and polluted rivers. The workers are known as ‘hands’ in this town and have no identity other than as operators of machines.
(iii) Emile Zola’s Germinal was written about the grim conditions of miners’1ife.
(iv) Thomas Hardy wrote about traditional rural communities of England that were fast vanishing. This change was highlighted by Thomas Hardy in his novel Mayor of Casterbridge.
(u) Many women novelists wrote about the domestic life on the basis of their experience. They wrote about women who broke established norms of society. The example of such novels is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre that was published in 1874.