ABSTRACT
Dinah Mulock Craik is a good example of the many Victorian female novelists whose creative work gives little obvious clue to the varieties of their own experience. She is a particularly interesting figure not only because of the discrepancies between her individual womanhood and her fictional version, but also because, of all the writers examined in this study, her life most fully illustrates the dichotomies of Victorian female roles. Self-dependent from the age of nineteen, she flourished professionally in a man's world, defending her own interests with an 'unfeminine' businesslike energy, yet she also craved for emotional fulfilment, and clung to an idealistically romantic creed. Moreover, during her career as a novelist, she made the transition from singleness to marriage, thus qualifying herself to evaluate personally the relative conditions of each state. Her experience of both sides of female existence sharpened her sense of its dualities, and made her acutely aware of the dilemmas faced by all her sex.
