ABSTRACT
George Meredith began working on Diana of the Crossways, the story of a 'lady of high distinction for wit and beauty', late in 1881, and the novel was finally published in three volumes in February 1885.1 These were notable years for legislative reform, and for the feminist movement: not only had the Married Women's Property Bill passed into law, but the Contagious Diseases Act was suspended, and the third Reform Act extended the franchise to agricultural labourers, but not to women. The Property Act, at last redressing the deficiencies in the first Act of 1870, was the most important reform in the marriage laws since the Divorce Act of 1857, in which Caroline Norton, upon whom Meredith partly modelled his heroine Diana Merion, played such an important part (see Appendix 2).2 This legislative victory was immediately qualified by the failure of women to gain the vote in 1884 (it was not gained in Britain until 1928), but it was nonetheless a triumphant achievement, without which the long process of social and legal emancipation for women could not proceed. As a writer for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine observed in 1883, if the husband 'is no longer the head of the wife (and, as far as property goes, he is so no longer), there seems no reason why wives should not have independent views, an independent profession, independent society, and independent interests' (qu. Holcombe, 1983, p.218). If the wife is no longer automatically absorbed into the legal identity of the husband, moreover, her rights to separate property embrace a more fundamental independence: a 'more pronounced individuality of character and position', in the words of another contemporary writer (p.218).
