ABSTRACT
Both Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did and Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Gallia were published in February 1895.1 While The Woman Who Did was ‘controversial from the start’,2 receiving, for the most part, unfavourable reviews,3 Gallia elicited a much more mixed response. Douglas Sladen, writing in the Queen, praised Dowie for creating ‘pleasant characters’ in a ‘delightful book’, but found it necessary to
reassure lady readers that it contained ‘not a single indelicacy of incident’.4 By
contrast, the Saturday Review considered that Dowie was even more daring than Allen: ‘a lady has promptly stept in where even a Grant Allen has not dared to tread’;
Gallia was ‘a book for the study than for the drawing room’.5 Meanwhile, Mrs Oliphant targeted Dowie, Allen and Thomas Hardy, bracketing them together as
members of the ‘Anti-Marriage League’.6
