Cholmondeley, Mary

Definition

Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925) was an upper-class, New Woman writer whose reputation largely rests on her 1899 best-selling novel Red Pottage. Rendered slightly suspect to the county families in her native Shropshire by her literary ambitions, Cholmondeley also found it difficult to identify with the new generation of radically inclined female authors she met in London. She remained ambivalent about female suffrage, partly because she eschewed the more violent measures of the militant suffragettes. She once complained that as a result she came “under fire from both sides.” Her complex response to prescribed class and gender roles, both of which were being increasingly challenged by the fin de siècle, makes her a challenging test case for critics of late Victorian and early twentieth-century feminism. As she acknowledged herself, she wanted contradictory things, “To be happy, and at ease, and live without effort, to be liked by the majority, to offend none, to attempt...