Packaging the Educated Female at the fin de siècle:
The Problem with Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman

Kristin C. Ross

Recent scholarship has established the perceived threat the New Woman posed to Victorian society, a threat requiring containment. One expedient means of suppressing the danger she presented the social order was to halt her progress by making the education that would teach her to rebel as unattractive as possible. Presenting education as a punishable offense was certainly one way to make it unappealing, and many New Woman authors did just that, consciously or otherwise. By punishing a female character's desire or receipt of education, fin de siècle novelists sold their audience the anti-feminist message that drove their narratives: education is anathema to women, and women who pursue it will suffer.

This paper argues that Ella Hepworth Dixon's efforts to revise negative stereotypes of the New Woman complicate her portrayal of female education in her novel. Her contributions to the fashioning of the image of the New Woman as female writer at the fin de siècle appear alongside photographs in Lady's Pictorial. In them, she attempts to make the New Woman more palatable to late Victorian audiences in much the same way she fashions her heroine, Mary Erle, in The Story of a Modern Woman. Rather than presenting the rigid character Victorian journals would readily lampoon, Dixon softens distinguishing New Woman features in her. However, Dixon's work is hard on the New Woman even as it is supportive, representing education that fosters ideals to which the New Woman might aspire but making those aspirations impossible to achieve.