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Feminist Solidarity in the Life and Work of Ella Hepworth Dixon 1

By Jad Adams

Introduction

Ella Hepworth Dixon (1857-1932) gave few direct clues to the interpretation of her work, allowing it to speak for itself, so the remarks she made in an interview with W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews are often taken as a statement of intent.  Dixon explicitly states, “The keynote of the book is the phrase: ‘All we modern women mean to help each other now.  If we were united we could lead the world.’  It is a plea for a kind of moral and social trades-unionism among women” (Stead 71). 2 It may well be such a plea, from Alison Ives, one of the leading characters in The Story of a Modern Woman, but was it genuinely meant by Dixon? Does either that book or any of her work indicate Dixon’s actual confidence in such an ideal?  In this article I examine Dixon’s position on feminism and solidarity between women, not just with regard to her novel The Story of a Modern Woman (which is generally understood to have made an important contribution to the construction of the public identity of the New Woman), but particularly regarding her often-overlooked short fiction, published in weekly periodicals, as well as her life.

The definition of  “feminism” and the question of its applicability to Dixon is problematic with reference to a time when the movement it defined was still in development.  Ann Heilmann notes that feminism “entered the English language a the same time as that of the New Woman and was then applied to suffragists” (5).  The OED records an 1895 meaning, from The Athenian, as “Advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex” (“Feminism”).  Heilmann, Ann Ardis and Sally Ledger have considered a range of attitudes and behavior typical of feminism, understood broadly, including a respect for education as a means of improvement of women’s lot; a questioning approach to marriage as a woman’s inevitable destiny; and to some extent a promotion of both a eugenic and a social purity agenda.  Dixon did not describe herself as either a feminist or a New Woman; she preferred the term “modern”.   However, by 1899 she was writing of “the modern feminist movement” (“Ceasing” 391).  Therefore it seems reasonable to consider her various statements about modern women standing together or helping each other as “feminist”. 

Dixon’s reference to trades unionism sets her remarks in the context of a turbulent industrial period when, as Sally Ledger describes, the affinities of many feminist women were shifting from being supporters of political liberalism to supporting the new socialist parties (36-8).  This was concomitant with the growth of trade unions, including those where women were prominent; a Women’s Trade Union League had been named in 1891 replacing an older title (Women’s Protective and Provident League).  Whatever their later image may have been in British life, in the late Victorian period trades unions were a force for self-improvement.  The match girls’ strike of 1888, led by Annie Besant, was successful in part because it enjoyed widespread public support for women taking action against their intolerable industrial conditions.  The movement commonly called the suffragettes was founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst as the Women’s Social and Political Union, because the notion of the solidarity of a union for women was progressive. In Ella Hepworth Dixon’s story “The Goddess from the Machine”of 1896, the fact that Helen is “great on Women’s Trade Unions” is evidence of her modernity, even though she is not an altogether admirable figure, and her pretensions are gently mocked (“Goddess” 1 and passim).

In the debate between Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) and Sarah Grand in the North American Review that represented the opposing standpoints of women writing on women, Ouida explicitly drew together the two monsters of social unrest.  She writes of  “The Workingman and the Woman … [that] both he and she want to have their values artificially raised and rated” (611).  Valerie Fehlbaum notes that Dixon’s use of the term “trades-unionism” stresses her “political consciousness” of the notion that socialism and feminism were new threats of similar magnitude (Dixon 44).  Consciousness is not the same as activism, however, and there is no evidence that Dixon herself ever took sides in this debate.

Dixon was well aware of these issues, as her picture of a socialist feminist in her humorous series of sketches My Flirtations of 1892 shows.  The narrator is Margaret Wynman; her sister Christina is steeped in the modern notions of socialism and vegetarianism and has nothing but sarcasm to contribute to her sister’s struggles in the marriage market. Margaret finally wins a man and is rewarded with the shroud-like wedding dress delivered in a wooden casket.  The indifference of her sister is defined by her modern ideas; she is busy reading an article on the “Underpayment of Feminine Labour,” which leaves the impression of the irrelevance of such “progressive” notions to the business of life with which Margaret struggles.  As Margaret Stetz remarks, comedy “may sometimes serve only to reinforce the undesirable status quo” (Comic Fiction xi).

Figure 1: One of the original illustrations from My Flirtations (author’s collection)

Dixon’s Writing Life

Dixon’s own life, apart from her support of the franchise for women (a cause widely supported by men as well as women, and no indicator of profound feminism), shows that she was not markedly committed to women’s social and political causes.  Her mother enlisted Dixon’s support for women’s suffrage when she was a schoolgirl, so continuing support for it could even be taken as evidence of a conservative continuation of values learned in the family, rather than of radicalism (Sketches 14).  She claimed not to know why she had been called a New Woman, since she was not associated with weighty women’s causes (41).

Her memoirs, such as they are, are a compilation of celebrity snapshots: ‘As I Knew Them’: Sketches of People I Have Met on the Way.  In this work of 1930, less than two years before her death, thirty-one people have their own chapter (including her father, who has two).  Only seven are women and three of those are society ladies; the others are Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Isadora Duncan.  Dixon therefore shows no urge to associate herself with radical women or the women’s cause.  If she knew such radical women writers as Elizabeth Robins and Evelyn Sharp, let alone the Pankhursts or the Garretts, she does not mention it (she refers to talking about Elizabeth Robins to George Brandes, not that she knew Robins herself).  Valerie Fehlbaum has discussed the female autobiography and the tendency of women to concentrate on their “professional or public achievements”  (Dixon 6-8). In her memoirs Dixon distances herself at a further remove, not writing about her inner self or public self but about other public figures.  Even given this self-imposed limitation, it would still have been possible for Dixon to have foregrounded famous women, had she wished to do so. 

Dixon’s foray into editing, the only time she held a position of direct control over a journal’s content, was as editor of The Englishwoman for six months in 1895 (obviously with some period of pre-publication planning).  This was “An illustrated magazine of fiction, fashion, society and the home” at sixpence monthly.  Dixon seems to have been editing it only until August 1895; therefore she was responsible for six issues.  Margaret Stetz notes that Dixon’s issues included fiction by Violet Hunt and Robert Hitchens, a profile of the French aesthete Pierre Loti, and reviews of daring books by George Gissing and George Egerton, which Stetz takes to be “careful planting of radical authors and ideas among the columns of household advice” (Dixon 100). The daring was literary rather than social or political, and was even handed as regards male and female authors.  Dixon’s concern appears to have been to place writers of advanced literary technique and subject matter before the public, irrespective of gender.  This may have been an estimable goal, but it does not fit with an aim of solidarity with women’s causes or promoting women writers.

In The Englishwoman’s eighty-four pages the regular features, which Dixon as the founding editor must have sanctioned, were “A Day’s Shopping”; “In Fashionland”; “To Those About to Furnish”; “Housekeeping (‘The Everyday Dinner’)”; “Chats with English Sportswomen”; “Gardens and Gardening”; “The Children’s Page”; “The Work Basket”; “Health Hints and Toilet Topics” and “Society’s Doings.”  Feature series commissioned under Dixon’s editorship were “French Authors of To-day”; “Ladies’ Clubs in London”; “Some Famous Stage Lovers” and an amateur photographic competition.  This made for a lively and interesting magazine, but The Englishwoman under Dixon was by no means a stalking horse for radical feminism.  The most challenging articles appeared after she had left the editorship, including “Concerning Women’s Suffrage” (for and against); “The New Woman and the Old Man”; “The Woman Movement in Russia” and “Is the Brain of Woman Inferior?” 3 One looks in vain in her editions for evidence of support for a “union” or even more informal solidarity.

Dixon began a weekly column for the Lady’s Pictorial on 22 June 1895, presumably starting this contract when the one with The Englishwoman was terminated.  Dixon was always aware of the necessity of continuously providing material for a paying public and wrote numerous weekly observational pieces as well as her stories.  Her work sits within a developing tradition of periodical literature which was, by the 1890s, the primary medium of debate for Victorian society.  As the introduction to a recent edition of Women’s Writing devoted to Dixon remarks, “everything [Dixon] ever published, including The Story of a Modern Woman and My Flirtations, appeared first in the pages of periodicals” (Women’s Writing 2). The majority of the fictional pieces Dixon published were in the Lady’s Pictorial,which aimed to be, as the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism describes, “more than a fashion and society magazine, and regularly published articles on the enlargement of women’s sphere, including several series on employment for women” (342).

Dixon lived her own life not constrained by a need to be married, making her own living week by week as an independent writer.  She could be considered the sort of “New Woman” characterized by Alys Pearsall Smith: “She asks simply and only for freedom to make out of her own life the highest that can be made” ( “A Reply” 450).  As Ann Ardis notes, this is not socially transformative and the perception that individual self-determination could be at variance with collective social reform was current in the 1890s (17-19).

Figure 2: Ella Hepworth Dixon (author’s collection)

Solidarity in Dixon’s work

Regardless of how Dixon herself lived, the literary issue has to be one of representation: of what Dixon’s fiction is saying about female solidarity.  Some of Dixon’s female characters show anything but solidarity for other women, though their behavior is open to interpretation.  Two stories, from either end of Dixon’s writing career, illustrate the point.  In “Murder - Or Mercy?” of 1888, the first story Dixon contributed to The Woman’s World, Lady Minton and Captain Egerton watch two young people drive off and joke about how long their love will last.  Their guess is six months, by which time their affection will have waned, then Egerton will have her.  “So this time next year we shall see you ‘Making the running’ with the beautiful Mrs Brooke?”(“Murder” 468). Love and marital happiness are a joke to this cynical society woman.  The story is to take a more profound turn that throws this callous society world into relief, when the last act of love between the young couple is of one of euthanasia. 

In the late story “The Capture of Miss Cohen” from 1907, Violet Cohen, daughter and sole heiress of South African mining magnate, is renting a castle in the Highlands to indulge her romantic attachment to Scottish history.  Lady Margaret, the owner of the castle, organizes the seduction - and abduction - of Violet Cohen by a clan chief.  Lady Margaret explains that marriage by capture is “an old custom in our family…especially when a young lady doesn’t quite know her own mind” (“Capture” 234) . It is debatable whether this is a betrayal of a young woman by an older one or, as the trajectory of the story suggests, one woman looking after another’s interests. Fehlbaum has commented on Dixon’s “fine sense of irony” (Dixon 49). An ironic reading of the texts is that the behavior of these ladies is appalling, but only a little more so than the commonplace act of an older women setting up a younger woman for a relationship, which is something that can reasonably be expected of their social role.

The notion of a sisterhood of womankind is strongly stated in the story “A Man of Pleasure” published in the Lady’s Pictorial in 1894.  It has not been reprinted, unfortunately, so it is worth giving some detail of the story (as is also the case with some other works cited here).  On the matter of women, the heroine Stella Magnus says, “It’s the one thing I feel very strongly about.  We ought to help, to sympathise, to care for each other.  We should be more charitable to the sins, the weaknesses of women, and less so – for practically we condone everything – to those of men” (“Man” 17).

Later Stella talks of “the moral superiority of woman, the great practical lesson which all we who believe in the new ideas are going to teach.”  Such high-mindedness is clearly set up for a fall when her ideals are so obviously undermined by her selfishness.  Swept up in her own romance, Stella has failed to notice how her lover, Vanderboken, has also been toying with her cousin Minnie, “who was delicate.”  The lover may be no paragon, but he and Stella are not so poorly matched.  Stella is an “egotistical, self-analytical woman…so eminently a modern young woman”; the suggestion is of conceit and a dangerous carelessness of the old proprieties (“Man” 17).

Vanderboken is a stock character, the seducer of fiction. We first see him strapping Stella into a chair on an Atlantic crossing, to protect her from the rolling motion of the ship.  He then goes down to the cabin to see Minnie, who flirts with him and reproaches him for not coming to see her earlier.  These people are out on the sea of life being thrown about by the great natural force of sex, which is in control of all their destinies.  The suggestion is not just that men are treacherous, but that life itself is perilous.  Stella falls for Vanderboken’s line when he begs her to take him as he is with all his faults, but to change him into a good man.  Minnie “seemed to realise nothing of what was going on” (18).

Stella in fact determines to accept Vanderboken’s suite not because of anything he has said but in direct response to the intervention of a woman.  Mrs Cardew has classified Stella as a failure and an old maid.  It is this act of contempt that propels her to accept Vanderboken, deciding to announce her engagement at Cardew’s ball.  She chooses the right frock for Minnie, not out of love, but because the girl’s appearance will reflect on her, “she was far too fastidious to have taken out a girl who might not be a success,” so here is also a use of the girl, as is Vanderboken’s flirtation.

When Stella’s engagement to the man is announced, Minnie falls down dead from shock (the ubiquitous heart disease) – this was predatory sexuality indeed.  “You’re a murderer, you’ve killed this child,” Stella tells Vanderboken.  She proclaims histrionically, ‘I who have always wanted to help other women - I have done this horrible thing’(“Man” 19).  However, life goes on with the men and women eating and drinking and matchmaking at the ball.  This gives an impression both of the callousness of ‘society’ and a feeling that life, like the ocean on which we first saw the main characters, has its own momentum, which is not considerate of individual needs.  Stella is as explicitly verbally feminist as any character in 1890s fiction, but no amount of talk about women standing together and teaching the world can overcome her desire to get what she wants from life without regard to others.  “A Man of Pleasure” is a story with no heroes, only warnings.

Figure 3:  One of the original illustrations for A Man of Pleasure (© The British Library Board LON LD5* NPL)

Dixon frequently wrote stories involving two women, an older and a younger one, neither of whom are married.  “A Man of Pleasure,” My Flirtations, “A Suburban Tragedy” and “The Goddess from the Machine” have this relationship.  It is as if she is seeking an insight into the question of how women should live their lives in the absence of marriage, a central question for first-wave feminists.  Eliza Lynn Linton had insisted that “The raison d’être of a woman is maternity.  For this and this alone nature has differentiated her from man, and built her up cell by cell and organ by organ.  The continuance of the race in healthy reproduction, together with the fit nourishment and care of the young after birth, is the ultimate end of woman as such” (“Wild Women” 80).   The preponderance of women over men in the nineteenth century prevented the realization of this destiny for hundreds of thousands of women, even if they had all desired it.  This called for a new way of living but also a new fiction to represent it.  In Dixon’s work, Ann Ardis says, “The ’natural’ inevitability of the marriage plot is challenged” (3).  Emma Liggins discusses spinsterhood in this changing world where the decline of the chaperone and the relaxation of some rules around female sexual behavior were leaving the modern spinster “at the mercy of economic forces and sexual games she cannot win”  (19)

Dixon plays out the implications of spinsterhood in “The Goddess from the Machine,” where two women are apparently in competition for the same man.  Here, in a story published in the Christmas edition of Lady’s Pictorial for 1896, Dixon presents a literary spinster and a young, educated woman who has a choice of careers ahead of her.  The younger women, Helen, is twenty-three, sun-burnt and boyish; she went to Lady Margaret Hall and is the most modern of the modern women of whom Dixon writes.  She intended to be a doctor but her aunt Agnes, a successful writer, was “bent on having her for a companion” (“Goddess” 1).  In the story they are touring Norway, which is very much a New Woman location. It was visited by George Egerton and Evelyn Sharp as well as Dixon herself who wrote about Scandinavia in The World  (31-2, 25-6). 4 Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen had a great influence on New Woman literature, and it may be that Dixon was familiar with Henrietta Frances Lord’s translation of A Doll’s House (which Lord translated under the title Nora) of 1882; or William Archer’s translation of 1889.  She could not have avoided knowing about the opening of the play at the Novelty Theatre on 7 June 1889, as it was the theatre-going sensation of the year in London.

In “The Goddess from the Machine,” another traveler, Julius Lindo, comes into the women’s lives; he is a 29-year-old wealthy man from Manchester with literary tastes who adores celebrities and pays attention to Agnes.  Under this late flowering romance, the 43-year-old writer “freshened up like a faded rose placed in warm water.”  Their relationship is guided from the sidelines by Helen who thinks their tentative approach unnecessary: “all this literary rot. Why can’t they both say what they mean?” (“Goddess” 4).  Her solidarity with her aunt extends to sending for Lindo under the pretext that she herself wants to see him, then encouraging him to propose to Agnes.

Though the subject of this feminine manipulation, Lindo has his own game to play.  He wonders if some of the writer’s celebrity might rub off on him, “in becoming her husband and future biographer, might he not, too, hope for his little niche in the temple of fame?” (ibid.)  Helen is, by this ruse, left to pursue her new woman goal of taking a medical degree.  Perhaps she would become a missionary of New Womanhood and go to India to tend to “those poor little brown devils in the zenanas.”  She has thus shown solidarity in sacrificing her chance at a gentleman admirer to let her maiden aunt have him – though it is far from clear that she had any feelings for the man; he is just an available mate.  Getting the aunt married off means she no longer has to be her companion and can pursue her dream of becoming a doctor.  She is as manipulative as any woman in a love story, but contemptuous of conventional female attributes: “Feminine regrets and sentimentalities!  What rot!  They’ve nothing to do with the women of today.  We’re strong.  We know” (ibid.).  Such arrogance does not fill the reader with confidence that she really is leading in the right direction, but her enthusiasm is enjoyable.  The story presents supportive feminine behavior, even though it is in the self-interest of Helen to help her aunt, and is hardly a sacrificial act.  Dixon is portraying the selfish feminist as she did with Stella in “A Man of Pleasure” and to some extent also with Christina in My Flirtations.  What they say is very progressive, but their attitude to other women is manipulative, they display not so much feminist solidarity as female leadership.

An even more dynamic portrayal of can-do female leadership occurs in “Its Own Reward,” which was published in The World in 1896.  Amy, parentless, her father bankrupt, worked as a clerk: “from nine in the morning till six at night the young girl sat addressing envelopes.  On three evenings a week she made a hasty meal at an Aerated Bread Shop and went to have her typewriting lesson” (One Doubtful Hour 65).   She is pining for her lover who has deserted her, probably because his parents will not let him marry a poor girl.  She and her sister Lily live with their aunt until Lily goes off as an actress and becomes a rich speculator’s mistress.  Later, when the speculator’s ventures fail, Lily is left alone and becomes a “housekeeper” to a retired wool manufacturer.  Amy goes mad, writing letters to her former lover.  She is saved by her sister’s return as a rich woman.  Lily says, “I shall soon find a nice husband for her…it’s all a question of good looks, and money – especially money” (81-1).  Though the situation seems to be one of solidarity, its moral point is the leveling effect of money.  The aunt, who had been unsympathetic to her niece as a fallen woman, who felt the family had been “disgraced,” now fusses around getting the best tea things out for the rich widow.

The image is that of Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, or Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid,” of the respectable sister who labors on terrible jobs while the wayward sister enjoys a good living as a kept woman.  “Aren’t men beasts!” Lily remarks, and vows to “pay them out” but in fact she has found a way to use her body to accrue sufficient money to secure her and her family’s future (58).  No man is ‘paid out’ by being cheated out of a promised marriage or in any other way; Lily has just learned how to manipulate the system.  Lily’s assistance to her sister is explicitly female solidarity, but buying in to the marriage market with money made as a mistress is hardly feminist.  Smart, practical women such as Helen and Lily are both admirable and both the subject of sly humor from Dixon.  The result is that they appear more human rather than narrow and calculating and the reader applauds, or at least is amused, at their blatant manipulation of life around them.  There is certainly no authorial invitation to judge them harshly. 

Dixon’s work is often set in a sterile place where spinsters wait for indifferent men.  In “A Suburban Tragedy,” Mary Merritt is infatuated with a man who is married. He returns to his wife in South Africa and she waits for him for years, until he comes back but it is only on a visit, he is on his way to get married.  The theme is of a woman sequestered in provincial society who is powerless to prevent a romantic attachment from becoming an obsession and who allows it to destroy her life.  In the context of the present paper, the interest is in the lack of solidarity shown by women in the course of “her long, monotonous, wasted life” (“Suburban” 1104).

Mary Merritt gets no support from women of her community (with the sole exception of the vicar‘s wife).  Enemies call her “that Miss Merritt” and her friends call her “Poor Mary.”  The “village maidens are hoarse of laugh and acrid of tongue,” the men are evil-looking loafers.  As for the middle class, “The rush and swirl of a nation’s life, the progress of thought, the enchanting and ever-changing ideals of art - all these meant nothing to the select feminine coteries of Watermouth and Thornton” (“Suburban” 1104).  The lack of feminine solidarity is compounded by the hypocrisy of such respectable people as vicious gossip Mrs Major Pollard, whose showy sisters are obviously having assignations with younger men.  The posh Misses Grumbleton “who led society” gave up bowing to Mary Merritt, and she received no more cards to invite her to their tea parties.  The young ladies of Thornton nudge each other when she passes.

Mary’s potential savior, if only she could see it, is the doctor, “a stout young man with a slightly pompous manner and an excellent heart.”  If there is one person in the story who shows solidarity, it is not Mary’s sister, who seems blind to the suffering, who “knew nothing of the tragedy of the older women’s life,” but this decent man.  “Tell me all about it my dear,” he says, and listens to her, though medically he can do nothing and she has long since rejected his proposal of marriage.  It is his words that are the final note of the story, “Women have all the worst troubles to bear, all the worst pain. Yet they live long” (“Suburban”1105).  These remarks are the underlining in this story of one of Dixon’s great themes: of the long, painful life of a spinster which seems to have no meaning  when marriage (and therefore reproduction) is denied.

The terrible monotony of waiting for the man is even more bleakly portrayed in a short story, “One Doubtful Hour,” first published in the Lady’s Pictorial in 1897, but which Dixon used as the title piece of her collection of short stories, helping to confirm the impression that it is the best of her stories.  Here women are far from supporting each other; rather, they are active competitors in the battle for a mate.  The story concerns Effie at a five-shilling dance, “But how tired Effie was of balls!  She had been to so many in her life, had danced so unceasingly in pursuit of an ever-vanishing husband.  She had been trying to look arch, and pretty, and lively for exactly twelve years” (“Doubtful” 4).

Effie calculates how much the men she can see are worth a year.  Dixon comments on the “certain exaggerated standard of liveliness and good looks in demand in garrison towns.  No falling off is permitted in either respect in popular feminine favourites” (“Doubtful” 12).  There is no sense of solidarity between the women in the same situation; Effie expects and receives no sympathy from other women. She stands upright with her chin in the air and keeps smiling. Her sisters are “borne off in the romping dance.  The girls, though plain, were young and fresh.”  The authorial voice, which is effectively Effie’s point of view, is disdainful: they are not even attractive, and their youth is their only asset.

Effie desperately wants a home of her own and a child, but instead of reproducing, she is endlessly condemned to the dance for access to reproductive potential – a man with the income to maintain her.  Effie has been in India looking for a man but was sent back by her sister-in-law, a woman of “whims and caprices” who had tired of Effie, “and had not scrupled to let her see it,” so there was no feminine solidarity from that quarter.  She had met a man on the steamer coming back and he appears at this dreadful dance but now, seeing her with others, though the couple dance and talk together, he rejects her.  On the steamer, “The ladies had been few, the men numerous; she had not been forced, by competition, to exaggerate her vivacity and charm….[now] She had, for all the world, the air of a lean and hungry huntress, and moreover, although he was too gallant to acknowledge it even to himself, that of a hungry huntress of men” (“Doubtful” 22-3).

She sabotages her own chance of happiness by making a silly remark – we are not told what it is, but obviously it makes her neediness too obvious.  Clearly now, she realizes, her chances have receded to vanishing point.  Finally, sick of it all, she commits suicide in her wretched room.  The impression is that it is the hopelessness of being an impoverished, unmarried woman; the man has been at best a sympathetic character, at worst just an interchangeable representative of his gender - it could have been any man.  It is the awful cycle of life that defeats her, a point underlined when a baby girl is born to her upstairs neighbors at the point of her death.  This suffering is something rather more profound, more cosmic than an injustice that would be alleviated by feminine solidarity, and it will not stop.  The story demonstrates Dixon’s facility in treating spinsterhood and the marriage market but her final scene shows how she is aiming at bigger targets in her fiction than social unfairness.

Dixon’s only major novel, The Story of a Modern Woman, also addresses this theme of the cosmic, not localized injustice of women’s lot.  The book first introduces Mary Erle who is dealing with her father’s funeral arrangements.  His deliberately secular funeral sets the tone for a book in which conventional morality as represented by religion is no longer taken for granted.  Dixon invites us to enter a world in which the old certainties do not prevail.  The book could be seen as an attempt to replace outmoded religious ethics with feminist values, but the most vocal representative of these values is Mary’s friend Alison Ives.  It becomes apparent that Alison’s “real desire to be in sympathy with her sex” does not extend to real sympathy with her friend (Story 39).  We observe her lack of solidarity over Mary’s choice of art as a career, “the whole thing is a farce”…“No woman ever made a great artist yet…but if you don’t mind being third rate, of course go in and try” (70, 42). Mary badly needs help from her friend, but receives contempt, Alison‘s unqualified assistance is offered to the poor. As a modern woman, she is half way between successfully earning her own living (finally as a journalist) and relying on a good marriage to get on in life.  As she is reduced in circumstances, she lodges with a woman who had been her family’s servant.  Mary rejects her former lover (with whom she is still in love) because she will not betray his wife.  Vincent Hemming offers to make her his mistress, but she says, “I can’t, I won’t deliberately injure another woman…All we modern women mean to help each other now” (255).  This reflects something previously said by Alison on her deathbed: “Promise me that you will never, never do anything to hurt another woman…If women only used their power in the right way!  If we were only united we could lead the world” (213). Hemming has married not for love – for he does love Mary – but wealth and position to a nouvelle riche provincial girl to whom Mary feels effortlessly superior.  Mary shows solidarity with the vulgar wife, but she immediately regrets her high-mindedness.  She feels it as a “personal triumph” that Hemming does not love his wife (250).  There is no moral uplift, even though she has done what she ethically ought to do. “What had she done that she was always to be sacrificed?” she thinks resentfully (261).  Ardis comments, “Thus the modern woman’s life story ends not in marriage…but in painful isolation, Mary’s sole consolation being the idea that she has done the right thing by Hemming’s wife” (134). 

To return to high-minded Alison: once she has rejected her otherwise perfectly appropriate lover because of his treatment of another woman, her reward is broken health, swift decline and death without marriage or reproduction.  She has probably contracted an infection from one of the poor women whom she is helping, from which she dies (she explains it as having caught a chill from waiting for an omnibus in the Mile End Road after visiting the poor).  Her solidarity with women of another class leads only to their contaminating her.  The greater meaning of the novel is that Alison’s high morality, “the torture of the ideal,” was of no more importance than “the burden of sex, the lust of life”: these are just transitory moments as “the great army of humanity moved on’ in a meaningless procession” (231).

One other way of beating the system, of a woman determining her own fate, which is presented as heroic, is in “Murder - or Mercy?  A Story of To-day.”  Alison Bligh and her admirer Dr Moore are at Minton Court near Exmoor.  She is a prototypical New Woman with “her tight fitting manly garments and the soft furs at her throat” and “the cynical little laugh.”  She tells Moore “‘tomorrow’ has absolutely no meaning for me; I believe in ‘to-day’, I mean to enjoy every hour of my life.”  In a movement suggesting both sex and the transience of life she is presented: “pulling a hothouse flower from her waist-belt, the girl pressed it, with a pretty, unconventional gesture, to her lips” (“Murder” 267). She tells him that life is like a party to which we are obliged to go, and we should leave when we please.

The young lovers go out on the moor but disaster strikes: the mare turns the dog-cart in which they were riding. Alison’s face is crushed and her spine damaged so she will never walk again.  After days of agony, when it is clear she can never recover, the loving doctor gives her a fatal dose.  Like the doctor in “A Suburban Tragedy,” here is another physician who understands women’s situation.  In The Story of a Modern Woman the doctor attending Mary Earle talks of “too much strain on the nervous system…There is something wrong somewhere…with our boasted civilisation.  It’s all unnatural.  Not fit, not fit for girls” (176).  It is as if an easy death is the solution that science offers in a world free of religious values.  Effie’s suicide in “One Doubtful Hour” at least brings her relief from the battle to find a mate.

Figure 4: Ella Hepworth Dixon as a young woman (author’s collection)

Overall, then, the message of Dixon’s fiction is not one of female solidarity.  The fictional characters who argue for women’s solidarity are either unsuccessful, like Alison Ives in The Story of a Modern Woman, or deluded, like Stella in “A Man of Pleasure.”  At best they are self-interested like Helen in “The Goddess from the Machine.”  Playing the game of a spinster waiting for a man produces the wretchedness of Effie in “One Doubtful Hour” or Mary Merritt in “A Suburban Tragedy.”  Mary Earl’s reward for integrity is to be sidelined by nature, “in all this gaiety of a new-born world only she was to have no part” (Woman 153).  If only reproduction has any meaning in the natural order of things, as the Darwinian ideology of the book’s narrator suggests, then sadly, Mary is human waste, plodding along in the twilight.

Dixon shows the betrayal of women by men and sometimes of women by women, but the great tragedy of life is life itself: the grind of everyday existence, the need to find a mate and to reproduce.  This is the cosmic unfairness of human life, which is not something about which social organization can do very much.  The world is a great and uncaring place. Its image is that of the sea rolling on relentlessly despite the death of a girl, while passengers eat and drink as they do in “A Man of Pleasure.” 

Dixon said in the Review of Reviews article quoted above that, “I wished to show how hardly our social laws press on women, how, in fact, it is too often the woman who is made, as it were, the moral scapegoat, and who is sent out into the wilderness, to expiate the sin of man” (Stead 71).  She does demonstrate this, but not how ‘standing together’ would help much, if at all.  Solidarity in her work is more an act of individual integrity than a pattern of collective behavior.  Most often it is the independent woman who outsmarts those around her.  Even for the most wretched of her fictional creations, escaping an intolerable situation by suicide or assisted suicide is seen as a proud and self-directed act of defiance.

Jad Adams is an independent writer specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London, a Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, and the author of Kipling (London: Haus, 2005); Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (London: I.B.Tauris, 2000) and Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004) as well as numerous papers on 1890s subjects. He is currently working on the biographies of women writers of the 1890s. www.jadadams.co.uk

Works Cited

Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels. New Brunswick:  Hutchinson, 1990.

Dixon, Ella Hepworth.  “As I Knew Them”: Sketches of People I Have Met On the Way. London: Hutchinson, 1930.

-----.  “The Capture of Miss Cohen.” Pall Mall Magazine,February 1907, 229-34.

-----.  “The Goddess from the Machine.” Lady’s Pictorial Christmas Number 1896: 1-5.

-----.   “A Leper’s Paradise.” The World, 4 July 1894, 31-2. 

-----.    “A Man of Pleasure.” Lady’s Pictorial Christmas Number 1894, 17-19.

----.      “Murder or Mercy: A Story of To-day.” Woman’s World October 1888, 446-49.

-----.  One Doubtful Hour and Other Side-lights on the Feminine Temperament. London: Grant Richards, 1904.

------.  The Story of a Modern Woman. London: William Heinemann, 1894.

------.  “Why Women are Ceasing to Marry.” The Humanitarian,14July 1899, 391-6.

------.  “A Suburban Tragedy.” Lady’s Pictorial, 27 December 1890, 1103-5.

Fehlbaum, Valerie.  Ella Hepworth Dixon: The Story of a Modern Woman. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.    

------, and O’Brien Hill.  “Introduction” to Women’s Writing, Special Issue: Ella Hepworth Dixon, 9 (2012): 1-4.

Grand, Sarah. “The New Aspect of the Woman Question.” North American Review 158
(1894): 270-6.

Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.

Ledger, Sally.  The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle.  Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Liggins, Emma. “The ‘Modern Spinster’s Lot’ and Female Sexuality in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s ‘One Doubtful Hour’.” Women’s Writing 19 (2012): 5-22.

Linton, Elizabeth Lynn. “The Wild Women No 1: As Politicians.” Nineteenth Century 30
(1891): 79-88.

Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé). “The New Woman.” North American Review 158 (1894): 611-19. 

Smith, Alys Pearsall. “A Reply from the Daughters.” The Nineteenth Century 35 (1894): 446-450. 

Stead, William T. “The Novel of the Modern Woman.”  The Review of Reviews,July 1894.

Stetz, Margaret.  British Women’s Comic Fiction, 1890-1990: Not Drowning but
Laughing.  Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

-----.   “Ella Hepworth Dixon.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 197.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1999.