ABSTRACT
The growing circulation of journals and their ever-increasing variety created both a need and an outlet for non-fiction articles as well as for fiction, with a gradual shift away from serialized novels in favour of shorter complete works. A phenomenal number of short stories were indeed then written and published by women. Some critics by drawing similarities between women's lives and women's writing, and suggesting that women actually write differently because of their physical experiences of the world, that the short story is a medium ideally suited for them, particularly those writing at the end of the nineteenth century. For many women of the period the tragic elements were no laughing matter and far outweighed the comic. All of the stories in Ella Hepworth Dixon's collection are therefore predictably concerned with women and women's lives, and offer fascinating examples of many of the pre-occupations of what has been dubbed New Woman fiction.
