The Story Of A Modern Woman

Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, first serialized in The Lady’s Pictorial between January and March of 1894, is known as a quintessential ‘New Woman’ novel. John Sutherland calls it “the greatest unread novel of female struggle of the century.” Dixon used her book to explore the double standards of late Victorian society over the expected behaviour of women. That is, she explores the subject of adultery in the life and fiction of the “modern woman”, fighting against these double standards even while making her heroine succumb to them.