The Fiction of Sex and the New Woman

Abstract

‘November 2. I spent the evening quietly with Carrie, of whose company I never tire. We had a most pleasant chat about the letters on “Is Marriage a Failure?”’¹ By the beginning of the 1890s, then, the great marriage debate had penetrated, via the daily press, to that bastion of lower-middle-class conformity, the Laurels, Holloway. Though Charles Pooter was doubtless happily unaware of the fact, the New Woman’s assault on sexual morality was well under way. In 1888 Havelock Ellis, still at the beginning of his career as spokesman for the new freedom, had declared uncompromisingly: ‘Sexual relationships, so long as they do not result in the production of children, are matters in which the community has, as a community, little or no concern’.² In 1890 Hardy, in his contribution to the New Review’s Symposium ‘Candour in English Fiction’, had lamented the constraints imposed upon the novelist by the tacit censorship of popular taste:

Life being a physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be concerned with, for one thing, the relations of the sexes, and the substitution for such catastrophes as favour the false colouring best expressed by the regulation finish that ‘they married and were happy ever after,’ of catastrophes based upon sexual relations as it is. To this expansion English society opposes a well-nigh insuperable bar.³