Divorce and the new woman

Anne Humpherys

pp. 137-155

in: Joseph Bristow, Josephine McDonagh (eds), Nineteenth-century radical traditions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

For most New Women writers, the "marriage question" was central, although there was no one position on it, even if the popular impression was that New Women were "anti-marriage", as stated by Margaret Oliphant in her article "The Anti-Marriage League", and as two famous novels, Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), appeared to confirm. As Sally Ledger observes: "The preoccupation with the institution of marriage…constituted a major part of the dominant discourse on the New Woman at the fin de siècle, [and it] was a preoccupation shared by the New Women writers themselves." Certainly, many New Women fictions did portray stifling, even deadly marriages. However, although some New Women authors were divorced (George Egerton and Menie Muriel Dowie) and others separated from their spouses (Dowie again, her second husband), very few of the bad-marriage fiction written by New Women authors offer divorce as a solution.