The Story of a Modern Woman (Broadview Literary Texts) - Softcover

Ella Hepworth Dixon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551113805 ISBN 13: 9781551113807

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2004

Synopsis

Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women’s weekly The Lady’s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself, the novel’s heroine Mary Erle is a woman writer struggling to make her living as a journalist in the 1880s. Forced by her father’s sudden death to support herself, Mary Erle turns to writing three-penny-a-line fiction, works that (as her editor insists) must have a ball in the first volume, a picnic and a parting in the second, and an opportune death in the third.

This Broadview edition’s rich selection of historical documents helps contextualize The Story of a Modern Woman in relation to contemporary debates about the “New Woman.”

About this title

About the Author

Steve Farmer teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is the editor of the Broadview editions of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1996) and The Moonstone (1999).

Review

“The Story of a Modern Woman is both the tale of a woman’s struggle to realize her independence as a professional writer and the story of modern London itself. On the verge of a new century, the crowded, gas-lit metropolis is depicted to almost cinematic effect as both the greatest obstacle to a woman’s self-realization, and her surest hope for the future. Steve Farmer’s splendid new edition allows us to fully appreciate Hepworth Dixon’s achievement, providing a well-chosen selection of essays and articles that sets the novel within the context of the major intellectual and cultural debates of the fin de siècle. This is a most welcome addition to our understanding of the New Woman.” ― Christopher Keep, University of Western Ontario

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1551113805
• ISBN 13: 9781551113807
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295
• Editor: Steve Farmer