210). He, too, can be opportunistic even when it seems that his life is ‘being shaped for him' (p. 190), and he is also to some extent capable of separating his personal from his public commitments – depression about his relationship with Sylvia in no way interferes with his successful trade negotiations. Indeed, as the narrator somewhat wryly points out, access to external activity, as for all of his sex, provides a relief from inner troubles:

Even with the most domestic and affectionate men, their emotions seem to be kept in a cell distinct and away from their actual lives. Philip had other thoughts and other occupations than those connected with his wife during all this time. [p. 325]

Philip is also capable of acting decisively. He is involved in the aftermath of the riots, working on Robson's behalf, taking Bell and Sylvia to see the accused in prison, and reporting on the proceedings at York Assizes. Furthermore, albeit unintentionally, he enters into the linear temporality of history when, as a recruited soldier, he takes part in the siege of Acre; his action on the battlefield not only contributes to a decisive historical moment, but, through his rescue of Kinraid, unites him with the traditionally male world of the former specksioneer.

Set against this outward-directed maleness is the very different dimension of femaleness. Women in the novel exist outside history; they are largely passive victims of male forces and have their own private, inner world which touches on but does not activate the outer public one. While their menfolk venture on the perilous trade of whale fishery, they wait at home for their return and listen to tales of their exploits. A recurrent image is of Bell and Sylvia sitting at the farm listening for sounds of Robson as he comes back from news gathering in Monkshaven; their most agonizing vigil is that which is never relieved, after the case has gone against him and he is condemned to death. Similarly, when Sylvia goes to her favourite cliff nook to meditate and to watch the ships, her thoughts do not extend to the wider sphere beyond, ‘to where they were bound to, or what strange places they would penetrate to before they turned again, homeward bound' (p. 102). No more can she penetrate the mysterious male outer world into which Kinraid seems to have gone when he returns to sea, passed ‘out of her sight into the thick mist of unseen life from which he had emerged' (p. 108).

Women are also powerless to change the external course of events: when the homecoming sailors are seized, they can only scream and weep – as Philip tells Sylvia, ‘“it's the law and no one can do aught against it, least of all women and lasses”’ (p. 31). Cut off from the reports of war and politics which are centred on the public house, they are unaffected by national events: to Sylvia and her mother, ‘a little bit of York news, the stealing of a few apples out of a Scarborough garden that they knew, was of far more interest to them than all the battles of Nelson and the North' (p. 92). Women are also excluded from the commercial world, the most notable example being Hester Rose, whose sex debars her from being offered a share in the Fosters' business. As Jeremiah Foster explains to Coulson and Philip:

‘We have not thought it necessary to commend Hester Rose to you; if she had been a lad she would have had a third o' the business along wi' yo’. Being a woman, it's ill troubling her with a partnership; better give her a fixed salary till such time as she marries.’ [p. 163]

The novel presents the female sphere as one of both disempowerment and positive influence. As has been indicated, women may spur on their men to deeds of resistance, but they themselves do not directly participate; they experience the consequences of action rather than initiating it. They exist under the omnipotence of male dominance, having internalized the notion of female subordination. Bell Robson thinks that women should ‘go through life in the shadow of obscurity,—never named except in connexion with good house-wifery, husband, or children' (p. 115); her feelings of inferiority have so coloured her outlook that she cannot find fault with Robson, even when he betrays his paternal responsibility by exposing Sylvia to vulgar gaze in the Admiral's Head:

She really believed her husband to have the serious and important occupation for his mind that she had been taught to consider befitting the superior intellect of the masculine gender; she would have taxed herself severely if, even in thought, she had blamed him. [p. 118]

Bell, of course, is an extreme instance of female self-deprecation. Other women, like the acerbic Alice Rose, the boldly self-assertive Molly Corney or even Hester in her quieter way, are more sceptical of patriarchal pretensions.