The Story of a Modern Woman is a novel written by English author Ella Hepworth Dixon

Ella Hepworth Dixon

Ella Hepworth Dixon was a British author during the late Victorian period.Her best known work is the New Woman novel The Story of a Modern Woman. This novel was published in 1894.-Life:Ella Hepworth Dixon was born in London in 1855...

. The novel was first published in 1894

1894 in literature

The year 1894 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*Robert Frost sells his first poem, "My Butterfly", to The New York Independent for fifteen dollars.*Hermann Hesse begins his apprenticeship at a factory in Calw....

 and is an example of the "New Woman

New Woman

The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century. The New Woman pushed the limits set by male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen . "The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain," according to a joke by Max Beerbohm...

" genre of late-Victorian England. The life of the protagonist, Mary Erle, loosely follows that of Hepworth Dixon: both the author and the character turned to journalism as a way of sustaining themselves after the death of their fathers.

Publisher's description

"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."

External links

The full novel is available online as part of the Victorian Women Writers Project http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/dixon/storymod.html.