ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two New Women novels, Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman and Sarah Grand's The Beth Book. It explains the various male characters presented in the novels, suggesting that their public and private lives cannot be understood as discrete and that they must be read in the context of late century feminism. In The Story of a Modern Woman, Dixon is less committed to imagining a man of the future than she is to demonstrating the male figures that oppose the New Woman's ideals and pursuits. Heilmann's comment that decadence was seen by the New Woman as merely 'a different expression of patriarchy' is worth recalling here as both the conservative editor of Illustrations and the dandies at the helm of the Fan and Comet endorse very limited understandings of what women could and should write.
