An Exploration of the Gender Politics in Ada Leverson’s Fiction: Bridging Victorian/Edwardian Ideologies with Modern Ideologies

Rachel Slivon

Ada Leverson’s contributions to Black and White, Punch, and the Yellow Book and her six novels were popular during the 1890s and early twentieth century for their comedy and marriage themes. One prevalent view in scholarly criticism is that Leverson is quite forward thinking for the Edwardian period. This exemplifies a trend in criticism about 1890s and Edwardian women writers and their work: Scholarship often focuses on these women’s progressive themes to emphasize their breaks with the past. Colin MacInnes claims of Ada Leverson, “Not only was she well ‘abreast of’ her times, but so often proves herself to have been well ahead of them” (14). Kathleen Graham states that Ada Leverson “rejected out of hand stereotyped Victorian ideals of domesticity and her outlook was advanced” (4). Sally Beauman claims that by Leverson’s last novel, “the dragons of conformity, convention . . . have been well and truly slain” (xvi). This trend in scholarship enables and encourages us to examine the complexities of these women’s literary careers and how they came to be viewed as progressive. Through an exploration of the gender politics in Leverson’s fiction, I contend that Leverson exemplifies the transitional by bridging aspects of her past and current gender ideologies with the developing ideologies rather than completely breaking with the past. For all of her Edwardian sophistication, in many of Leverson’s most famous works, such as The Little Ottley trilogy, which contains her novels Love’s Shadows, Tenterhooks, and Love At Second Sight, she actually reinforces a key component of the traditional Victorian gender system, female sacrifice, through a paradigm of triangular desire.