ABSTRACT
Like the sensation novelists, the New Woman writers were accused of knowing and, more importantly, articulating ‘much that ladies are not accustomed to know’ (James 1865:593), especially about sex and the pathology of sexual disease. Arthur Waugh (1894) was not alone in holding ‘women-writers … chiefly to blame’ for ‘the latest development of literary frankness’, which ‘in fiction … infects its heroines with acquired diseases of names unmentionable’ (217–18). In their overt and explicit treatment of the double standard and the pathology of sexual disease, the New Woman writers were involved in a reworking of those discourses on prostitution and female sexuality within which the sensation novelists wrote.
