ABSTRACT
In the two preceding chapters, girlhood experience in the early and mid-Victorian years has been analysed through the method of group biography. To conclude the composite portraits, this chapter will focus on the experience of three women who were born in the 1880s: Phyllis Bottome and Helen Corke, both born in 1882, and Marie Stopes, born in 1880. In her autobiography, Helen Corke declared that she belonged ‘indisputably to both nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, and, as that comment suggests, it is the bridging during their formative years of two radically different periods that distinguishes these women from the mid-Victorian generation. While all of the women included in the analysis of mid-Victorian experience lived past the watershed of the First World War, they were, unlike those born after 1880, essentially Victorian: they had experienced childhood and youth at the pinnacle of Victorian prosperity and the dominance of Victorian ideology, and they had lived a considerable portion of their adult lives before they were affected by the changing circumstances of the new century. In contrast, women who experienced girlhood in the 1880s and 1890s were, first of all affected by the considerable changes in social, intellectual and sexual mores that had begun to be evident even in the last decades of the century, and second, they experienced their early adulthood in the years when the foundations of the Victorian liberal consensus were crumbling.
