ABSTRACT
Margaret Georgina Todd was one of the first female medical doctors in Britain and an advocate for women's medical education, though she is much less well-known than a woman who was in many ways her partner in this work, Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake. Margaret Todd worked as a teacher at a school in Glasgow before beginning her studies at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women that had been established by Jex-Blake in 1886, though women were prohibited from enrolling at universities in Scotland until 1892. As Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson argue in an examination of this theme, 'this novel is unusually complex in its treatment of adolescent innocence, and, at the same time, unusually focused on the issue, since Margaret Todd is writing with the purpose of defending medical training for girls'. Mona Maclean is an example of New Woman fiction in its radical redefinition of the stereotype of the intelligent woman as hysterical.
