ABSTRACT
Maurizio Ascari writes ‘when looking backwards authors always interpret the development of a phenomenon in an instrumental way in order to highlight those aspects that correspond to our current needs and wishes – ideology and desire both being involved in this process’. The Lover, The Babyons and Broome Stages undoubtedly generate sympathy towards diminished patriarchs in ways which contemporary readers might consider excessively conciliatory, yet they portray masculinity as absurd and its proponents are ultimately firmly and satisfactorily subordinated in line with the narrative perspective. If the tendency to judge Dane’s work from current feminist and post-feminist perspectives is resisted, and it is interpreted in the light of inter-war feminist ideologies operational in writings which mapped a slowly changing hegemony and spoke to women accustomed to acquiescence but starting to resist traditional role-expectations, its messages clearly correspond to and generally exceed the feminism of the work of many of her contemporaries.
