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Lawrence Rainey
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 53, Number 3,
2010, pp. 308-330 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/elt.0.0124

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elt/summary/v053/53.3.rainey.html

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Secretarial Fiction: Gender and Genre

in Four Novels, 18971898
LAWRENCE RAINEY
University of York
The years 1897 and 1898 saw the publication of four British

novels, not often read today, that shared a common trait: their heroine
was a typist or secretary. That did not entail that their plots unfold
along identical lines or end with a common conclusion. (Only one, for
example, closes with a comic or romantic ending in which the heroine
receives a proposal of marriage.) Nor did it entail that they address
an identical corpus of readers. (Ones subtitle proclaims it A Story for
Girls of To-day, clearly invoking teenage girls, while the others contain literary and topical allusions presuming readers with general
knowledge far beyond that of adolescents.) The four also vary in narrative style: one sparkles with comic insouciance (The Type-Writer Girl),
while another is weighted with sober realism (A Bachelor Girl in London); one is barbed with arch authorial comments (The Crook of the
Bough), while another drones with didacticism (Miss Secretary Ethel).
Yet despite these differences, the novels share a second trait, again
pertaining to the secretary-heroine: she is an orphan. At first glance
this is perplexing, even counterintuitive. We cannot explain it by recourse to the lives of secretaries in the real world, of whom only a tiny
percentage can have been orphans. We must assume it is a convention
that fulfills a function, enabling these novels to do fictional work they
could not otherwise perform. (The task of specifying that work can be
deferred till later.) For now we need only underscore how loose, how
tenuous is the linkage that binds a set of traits in the heroine (an occupational category, orphanhood) to a broad field of possible actions
and events. Is this linkage of the same sort that typifies those exemplary genres of popular culture, the mystery (or detective fiction) with
its detective hero, and the Western with its cowpuncher protagonist?
Both those genres were being consolidated at roughly the same time:
the short stories about Sherlock Holmes that were published in the
Strand between 1891 and 1893 defined the detective genre for years to
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come, while Owen Wisters classic novel The Virginian (1902) reshaped
and consolidated the cowboy story. Do our four novels from 18971898
constitute a comparable type or genre, call it secretarial fiction, taking
form in the same decade? Or were they merely variants of another type
of novel extensively studied in recent years, the New Woman novel of
the 1890s? To ask how we go about typing or classifying these four novels, it seems, entails glancing at related questions about popular genres
and their constitution, about the changing status of women and their
fictional representation, and about the connections that bind together
world and text, social realities and fictional conventions.

The Type-Writer Girl

The first-person narrator of The Type-Writer Girl is Juliet Appleton,
a twenty-two-year-old graduate of Girton College, the Cambridge college for women that first opened in 1869.1 Her father, an American who
nevertheless served as a colonel in the British army, has died some four
months before the novel opens. Shortly before his death he had refused
to carry out an order that was against his conscience and been forced
to resign, and as a result has left no pension for his daughter. Juliet
must now find work to support herself. From one incidental comment
(I had been reared in the country) we learn that she grew up in a village or market town; from another (I had never known mine) that her
mother died in childbirth.2 But little more.
This lack of biographical depth corresponds with the novels emphasis on the frothy surface of Juliets narrative, her quicksilver responses
to everything that comes her way. An analogous lack of depth is found
in the books narrative structure: it marshals no overarching plot that
unfolds from beginning to end, and instead recounts an episodic series
of adventures, each capped by a conspicuous non-ending that tacitly
rejects more conventional expectations of closure. This preference for
episodic variety over narrative continuity is voiced by Juliet from the
very beginning. She is beguiled by Samuel Butlers thesis, advanced in
The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), that the author of the Odyssey was
not Homer, but a woman. Without thinking it true, I love to believe it.
Juliet prefers the freedom of fiction over the constraints of fact. She
also prefers the Odyssey over the Iliad because it has the vagueness,
the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft.3 Imaginative freedom and the feminine are implicitly aligned. And her own narration will be similar. She is a female Odysseus, forever tempted by the
next adventure. Temptation even dictates the ever-shifting set of works

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that Juliet cites as analogues to her own story. The recurrent analogy with the Odyssey slips from view as Juliet compares herself with
Esther from the eponymous book of the Bible, Juliet in search of her
Romeo, Rosalind from As You Like It, Carmen from Bizets eponymous
opera, or the princess Cleodolind awaiting rescue by Saint George, a
patron saint to Julia except when her need of cash drives her to seek
a new one, leading her to choose Saint Nicholas, who presides over
pawnshops. The Type-Writer Girl lapses happily from the straight
course of narrative into the byways of comic digression. Her story is
pure picaresque.
Juliets first adventure takes place at a legal firm called Flor and
Fingelman. Her troubles begin as soon as she enters the office and
finds three clerks, one a pulpy youth:
He eyed me up and down. I am slender, and, I will venture to say, if not
pretty, at least interesting-looking.
How many words a minute? he asked after a long pause.
I stretched truth as far as its elasticity would permit. One ninety-seven,
I answered with an affectation of the precisest accuracy. To say Two
hundred were commonplace.
The pulpy youth ran his eyes over me as if I were a horse for sale. Thats
good enough, he said slowly, with a side-glance at his fellow-clerks. I had
a painful suspicion that the words were intended rather for them than for
me, and that they bore reference more to my face and figure than to my
real or imagined pace per minute.4

Things scarcely improve when she is introduced to the boss, Mr. Fingelman: He perused me up and down with his small pigs-eyes as if
he were buying a horse, scrutinising my face, my figure, my hands,
my feet. I felt like a Circassian in an Arab slave-market. I thought he
would next proceed to examine my teeth.5 Juliet gets the job, even
manages to endure three days of her bosss ogling. His smile was the
smile that knows itself irresistible. He had not as yet ventured anything rude to me, but I scented prospective rudeness in the way he
watched me coming in and out. Yet more than mere apprehension
motivates her decision to leave Flor and Fingelman: On the fourth
day, however, the rebel in my blood awoke. Not for nothing had my
ancestors fought at Lexington. I felt I must strike one blow for freedom.6 While at lunch, she overhears a political economist from Cambridge (immediately recognizable as such to Juliet, a Girton girl) who
describes an anarchist commune recently formed just outside London.
Juliet decides to join at once and promptly enquires about its location.

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Armed with this information, she abandons her job, pausing only to
pawn her typewriter (she needs cash), and sets out with her bicycle to
find the rural commune.
Men will be men, however, and Juliet does not fare all that much better among the anarchists:
All the comrades were devoted in equal parts to myself and my bicycle. In
the evenings, when work was done and we had watered the cabbages, I
gave them lessons in turn on the mysterious monster. From the beginning
it occurred to me that most of them were anxious to entice me away from
the common field towards remoter lanes where occasions for private talk
were more easily obtained.7

Juliet resists these blandishments, and the chief anarchist Rothenburg warns her that the males are unhappy with her: You keep yourself aloof. You have no camaraderie.8 But to demand that she socialize more is merely another form of coercion incompatible with anarchism, says Juliet. She announces her departure. But not before one
male anarchist claims that her bicycle has become communal property
that she cannot now reclaim: My blood was up. The old Eve in me
was roused. The American eagle in my heart flapped its wings. I remembered how my fathers had fought at Lexington (they were quite a
property with me).9 Juliet promptly rides off on her bike, her second
adventure (chapters 57) having lasted only a tad longer than her employment (chapters 23).
After a bicycling accident introduces Juliet to one Michaela Allerdyce,
with whom she soon becomes good friends, Juliet takes up work at a
second firm, this one a publishing house run by an educated young
manhandsome, intelligent, and very eligible. At his suggestion, Juliet even writes an essay, which is published in a journal belonging to
another house and earns her the princely sum of twelve guineas. When
Romeo (the sobriquet that Juliet bestows on him) asks her to type up
some anonymous poems, she recognizes that they are his, and also that
they allude to her. Sparks of romancepurely verbalare beginning
to fly. When he announces that hes taking his holiday in Venice, Juliet
decides to be a Rosalind to his Orlando; she will follow him and force
his hand.
In Venice she discovers that Romeo is not just there on holiday. He
has gone to escapefrom her! He is already engaged, has been so for
five years, and his wedding is only weeks away. He has come to meet
his fiance, stay with her for the weeks preceding the ceremony, and so
avoid any temptation from Juliet. When he runs into her in Venice his
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heart is swept away, and Juliet urges him to do the honorable thing: to
tell his fiance that his affections have gone elsewhere. But when she
then learns that the fiance is her own friend Michaela, she reverses
course and persuades him to do the other honorable thing: to marry
Michaela as planned. Juliet offers explanations of her reversalsisterly solidarity, the sanctity of promisesbut they seem more like rationalizations than rationales.
Behind them stands something dimly felt but no less compelling:
the implacable logic of genre and character. Juliet is a picaresque hero,
and such heroes live within the charmed immunity of perpetual adolescence. She cannot assume the responsibilities of mature sexuality,
or marriage, without ceasing to be Juliet, in the same way that Kim,
the hero of Kiplings picaresque masterpiece, can never become a man
without ceasing to be Kim. Romeo now resolves to marry Michaela.
Michaela herself knows that Romeos affections have been waylaid by
a typewriter girl in the office, but what she doesnt realize until the
books final pages is what Juliet reveals to her as a gondola carries her
away toward the train station where shell begin her journey back to
London:
Michaela, I cried, now I will tell you! An impulse came over me; I could
no longer resist it. It was I who stole your Romeos heart by mistake! It
was I who played Carmen and beguiled your Don Jos. It was I who sent
him back. I am the type-writer girl!10

Juliet returns to London, where she writes the account that we have
been reading but otherwise remains unchanged, as the books final
sentence assures us: For I am still a type-writer girlat another office.11
Juliets triumphant use of anaphora (It was I who) is capped by
her conflating her identity with that of the book: I am the type-writer
girl! Or perhaps it should read: I am The Type-Writer Girl, a picaresque tale that subtly reverses centuries of literary tradition. For the
heroes of picaresque fiction have typically been males, from Don Quiote
to Tom Jones, from Kim to Sal Paradise. Juliet, with her sassy mastery
of urban spaces that range from pawnshops to opera halls, more than
matches wits with her male counterparts.

A Bachelor Girl in London

Geraldine Mittons novel A Bachelor Girl in London is an ambitious
first novel that recounts a year in the life of Judith Danville, a twentythree-year-old woman who has been in London for three weeks when
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the book opens.12 She is seeking a job as a secretary, preferably with

a publisher, for she also harbors literary ambitions, and she has only
enough money to last two more weeks. Her move to London has resulted from a conjuncture of private ambitions and family circumstances.
Judiths mother died when she was fourteen. After four years of widowhood her father remarried, but five years later himself died, leaving
Judiths stepmother, Kate, with responsibility for her and her three sisters. A doctor whose practice in a market town had never really thrived,
her father has left each of his four daughters an annual income of 20,
a welcome sum but hardly enough to survive. Partly to avoid becoming
a burden on her stepmother, partly to find a world more amenable to
her inchoate aspirations, she moves to London.
She has only one point of contact in the big city, her stepmothers
sister, Mrs. Amoore, who is married to a very prosperous man. Mrs.
Amoore is a socialite who presides over a coterie of younger writers and
intellectuals that includes her son. It is through her and her friends
that Judith will find her way in London. One of these is Christine Rosslyn, a fashionable poet who furnishes Judith with an introduction to
Edward Dasent, my business advisor as Christine calls him, but also
a prosperous silk agent who manages a large concern in the City.13
Dasent hires Judith as a typist, adding two admonitions about her conduct in the office: Now, we dont have any ladies here, we are all working men and women, and Of course you understand that everything
that goes on here is strictly private, you must not talk of my business
affairs or discuss the letters.14 Both will come to haunt her.
The novel charts Judiths changing relationships with three very different men. One is Alexander Rosslyn, disgraced brother of the poet
Christine. Though currently employed as a middling clerk somewhere,
he has earlier been convicted of fraud and served time in prison. On
Judiths first day at work she takes note of him when he pays a brief
visit to Mr. Dasent (chapter 6). She also notes that Mr. Dasent wants
nothing to do with him (after Rosslyn leaves the premises, he tells a
clerk: When Mr. Rosslyn calls again Im not in).15 But he is handsome and dresses with refinement, prompting her to make enquiries
about him. Twice she is warned that he has a bad reputation and has
engaged in deceptive practices (chapters 8, 13). And unbeknownst to
her, he has been actively seeking her acquaintance, using his sister
to gain an introduction (chapter 10). One Saturday she meets him a
second time by chance at a cricket match and he escorts her home; and
the next day, at his suggestion, she consents to his accompanying her
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on a ramble through the byways of the City (chapter 12). A few months
later, another chance meeting gives him the opportunity to broach a
new idea with Judith (chapter 16). He has recently bet ten pounds with
his friend Philips, Mr. Dasents former partner, over how much income
Dasent receives from his business. Judith can help him win by simply
copying some document in the office that would confirm his estimate,
and of course hed be only too glad to give her the resulting cash. When
Judith comes across a pertinent document, she copies it, then sends
him a note requesting that he visit her (chapter 21). But when he turns
up in the flesh, Judith regrets her ill-considered step. She refuses to
give it to him. But Rosslyn will not be stopped; he knows that she has
it and threatens to use force if she doesnt turn it over. Trapped in her
own room, she gives it up, with bitter regret. Shockingly, Rosslyn then
avows his love for her, even inviting her to join him and his confederates in fraud. Judith rejects his offer, horrified by what she has done,
deliberately and inadvertently. A few months later Mr. Dasent gives
her notice that she is dismissed (chapter 26). Some event, one not recounted in the novel, has alerted him to Judiths betrayal.
The second man Judith takes up with is Tom Ireland, the driver of an
omnibus. She makes his acquaintance by chance when she becomes the
only witness to a minor traffic accident hes been involved in (chapter
9), offering testimony to his innocence. But that encounter leads to another, and then another. While he drives the omnibus that takes Judith
home after work, she plies him with questions about his job and even
his life outside of work. At one point he gives her his cape to protect
her from a sudden, violent storm (chapter 13); soon she feels that she
cannot leave town for her holiday without first bidding him farewell
(chapter 14). Later, when she is forced by Alex Rosslyn to turn over the
document from her office, she can confess her mistake only to Ireland
(chapter 22). But by this point, a third man has entered into her life,
partly as a consequence of her rapport with Ireland.
When, during her holiday (chapter 15), Judith informs her stepmother about her friendship with Ireland, her stepmother grows alarmed:
Judith, in her view, is so unconventional that she might even strike up
a romantic liaison with such an inappropriate figure. When she next
visits her sister Mrs. Amoore in London (chapter 18), she voices her
worry and asks for counsel. Mrs. Amoore proposes a solution: she has
a young friend named Lawrence Pitt, the handsome editor of a literary review and a man whom Judith has already met (chapter 7), and
he can be assigned the task of courting Judith to distract her from

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Ireland. Pitt, who has been conducting a purely verbal flirtation with
Mrs. Amoore, accepts the assignment, but soon finds himself genuinely
intrigued by Judith. Meanwhile, his first novel is published to critical
acclaim (chapter 23), and Judith, in turn, is intrigued by him. When
she gives him an essay that she wrote over the holiday, one recently
rejected by another journal, he offers to publish it, provided that she
execute his suggested revisions (chapter 24). The sum that she earns
also turns out to be substantial (chapter 25). But then comes the fatal
moment when Judith is dismissed from her position by Mr. Dasent.
Seeking sympathy, she turns once more to Tom Ireland, telling him
what has happened and adding that she may well emigrate to Canada
together with her sister Connie. But to her shock he suggests she take a
very different step, asking if she will consider an offer of marriage. Her
reaction, voiced with horror and amazement, is instantaneous: Ireland, what do you mean? How could I marry a man of your class?16
Her question is as thoughtless and cruel as he has been thoughtful and
good to her. Though she apologizes only a moment later, their friendship has already ended. Pitt, meanwhile, continues his courtship of Judith, even informing Mrs. Amoore that he is no longer playing a role,
but is now serious (chapter 28). But when Judiths stepmother once
more comes to town, she confesses her part in devising Pitts courtship,
leaving Judith in doubt whether any of the emotion she has felt toward
him is more than an illusion (chapter 30). In the books final chapter
(chapter 32), Pitt avows his affection, stills her doubts, and secures her
consent to his proposal of marriage. When he discloses that his experience with her has changed him, the novel and Judith herself nearly
burst in a paroxysm of bliss:
A glad rush of joy loosened all the chains in Judiths heart. His love was
bliss indescribable, unknown, but he had now also given her back herself.
The sordid, stained creature, whose reflection she had grown used to look
for in the mirror of her mind, had vanished, and she stood reincarnate once
more, a strong, pure woman, sanctified by the privilege of her greatest gift,
the power of raising and ennobling man.17

This ending offers such starkly conventional closure that a reader almost forgets the books earlier parts, grimly recounting the errors and
poor judgments that have led to Judiths dismissal from her job and the
destruction of her friendship with Ireland. Its almost as if the books
ending, with its strident assertion of happiness and a conservative return to normalcy, were meant to compensate for the more anxious
scrutiny of the earlier chapters: as if unease about the public status of
women might be allayed by a generous dollop of private bliss.
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The Crook of the Bough

The Crook of the Bough begins where A Bachelor Girl in London
leaves offwith a proposal scene, an offer of marriage being tendered
to Islay Netherdale.18 (Her name is so unusual that the books first
page furnishes a pronunciation guide: Her name is pronounced like
the word island with the nd left outIla.) Twenty-five years old and
an orphan, she works as a private secretary to her only brother George,
four years older and a member of parliament. Islay is a variant of the
New Woman as depicted in contemporary novels: her clothes are plain
and her cast of mind so earnest and cerebral that her suitor thinks he
is enhancing his marriage proposal by adding a pledge to keep their
future sexual exertions to a minimum: I really do not think I am selfish, or that I shouldshould intrude my love upon you toowell, its
hard to find a word that will express ittoo primitively.19 Islay is not
impressed and tactfully rejects his proposal.
From the start, The Crook of the Bough announces its fascination
with reversals. A marriage proposal comes at the books beginning
rather than its end and results in rejection rather than acceptance.
But these reversals might themselves be reversed, at least if we attend to the resonance of the books title. Shortly after Islay and her
brother George arrive in Istanbul, they find themselves in a discussion
with several men about the status of modern women in the West. One
is Sondes, a British lawyer whose practice in Istanbul is thriving. He
draws a facetious yet significant analogy between monkeys and women.
Monkeys have all the organs of speech that humans have, teeth, palate, larynx, glottis, and so on, but until now have made only inarticulate chatter, not speech. It is a sly and subtle laziness that motivates
their reticence; but then he elaborates his comparison between the
race of monkeys and the emancipated Western women20 one step further. Recently women have begun to speak, but that also means that
they will have to work and do not just the easy work, but also the
dirty work of the world.21 And when that happens, Sondes tells Islay:
in time you will come to regret those first indiscreet whispers you
will sigh again for your coco-nuts for the lazy comfort of the crook of
the bough.22 The crook of the bough is the position of women before
the contemporary movement of emancipation, but also one that many
women will soon wish to return to (another reversal). Not surprisingly,
the end of the novel finds Islay back in her flat in London and resolved
to elicit another proposal of marriage; the man who appears at the door
to call on her is Sondes: enchanted by Islays new appearance, he will
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soon offer the crook of the bough, a conventional marriage. And it is

just as certain that Islay will accept.
The novel has an envelope structure, beginning with a proposal of
marriage that is rejected and concluding with another waiting in the
wings and sure to be accepted. That structure frames the novels three
parts: the first takes place in London (chapters 15); the second abroad
(chapters 620), chiefly in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire;
and the third back in London (chapters 2127). The three locations
punctuate the transformation that takes place in Islay. In the first part
she is recognizably a variant of a New Woman character, albeit very
different from Juliet Appleton. (She doesnt ride a bicycle, adopt rational dress, or smoke cigarettes, nor has she been educated at Girton College.) She shuns fashionable attire, speaks French and German fluently, and performs her secretarial tasks with earnest sobriety. Everything
about her is practical, efficient, and plain. When she stops in Vienna
while en route to Istanbul, her clothes ensure that she can go out alone
without fear of attracting attentionat least not from males:
None could have been more plainly clad than she. A dust-coloured coat and
skirt, with a shirt of dust-coloured silk and a hat to matchthat delusive attempt to achieve elegance by mere mechanical sequence, and brown
walking shoes upon her feet. And yet a few people did notice her. because they perceived, and it irked them to perceive, a person with many
natural advantages deliberately casting these aside. They were women
who looked at her. Not a man cast a glance.23

Her utilitarian cast of mind shapes her view of the world: If her attention were drawn to a sunset, she would read in it the emblem of
something or othernot a sunset. Her outlook belongs to that section of the educated class that has never realised the Beautiful as the
Beautiful.24
It is while traveling to Istanbul that she makes the acquaintance
of Madame dAvril, a young French woman who dresses fashionably,
behaves flirtatiously, and revels in the attentions of her husband and
his friends. But here again another reversal of our ordinary expectations takes place. France is indubitably a part of the West. Yet several
characters in the novel insist that being French is tantamount to being Eastern, Oriental, even Turkish. Islay, her brother George notes,
has often asserted that the French are so beastly Oriental!, a statement she herself later confirms: I have often thought how Oriental
French people are.25 When Islay stops by Madame dAvrils room, she
finds her singing La Brise, one of the Mlodies Persanes by the com-

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poser Saint-Sans, and when she then discusses the Armenian question with dAvrils friends (all French), she is amazed at the view the
whole party took: it was Oriental in itself.26 Hassan Bey, a Turk who
has earlier lived in France, recalls that the French women he met there
were very similar in manners and point of view to our women. If you
could take a Turkish lady from her seclusion and place her in mixed
society, she would behave very like a French lady.27 There is even a
neat reversibility to this observation: What is much odder, the French
lady, with all her advantages, deliberately chooses, as it seems to me, to
foster about herself many of the restrictions and illusions that hamper
the Turkish lady.28 At one point Islay visits Madame dAvril when she
is at work with her cosmetics, and after observing her for some time
Islay comments: You ought to be a sultana, a term fraught with resonance of the East and the Orient. But dAvril promptly replies: I am
a sultana! Every woman should be a sultana, with a train of slaves,
and her foot on the neck of a conqueror! That is how she looks best.29
When she then counsels Islay on how to improve her appearance, she
demurs: I am not a Sultana.30
Perhaps notor perhaps only not yet. For Madame dAvril has initiated a gradual process of orientalizing and feminizing Islay. Its first
manifestation appears in chapter 14, the midpoint (and turning point)
of the books twenty-seven chapters. As do so many tales about the
fatal decline of modern women, it begins with shopping. Finding herself alone on a major thoroughfare, Islay suddenly notices a black hat
with violets and soft green tulle in the window of a shop. The narrative overtly connects this event with Madame dAvril. The name on
the shop was a French one; the attraction of the shop was a French
attraction. With an odd suddenness Islay Netherdale turned and went
in at the door.31 The narrator underscores the significance of odd
suddenness, elaborating a distinction between impulse and decision,
spontaneity and deliberation, binary oppositions that dovetail with
others evoked earlier in the novel: female and male, East and West,
France-Turkey and Britain, body and mind, pleasure and asceticism,
beauty and utilitarianism. The old Islay (deliberative, ascetic, cerebral,
frumpy, artless, male, British, and Western) has begun to make way for
a new one (impulsive, sensuous, seemingly frivolous, elegant, artful,
female, French, and Eastern).
The other character whom Islay meets during her travels is Hassan
Bey, a handsome officer in the Turkish cavalry. His passport may be
Turkish but his intellectual citizenship is located in the West, and he is

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a fervent admirer of the modern, emancipated woman. Told that Islay

has helped her brother prepare election speeches and even addressed
meetings on his behalf, his eyes glow with admiration of these proofs
of a womans power. For him Islay is remarkable from the very lack
of all arts and airs about her, her plain, even ugly dress, and her direct,
simple way of conversing with men about politics or any other serious
subject.32 His admiration, moreover, is tethered to an entire outlook on
geopolitics: this matter of womans position forms the governing cause
in a nations prosperity; because Britain is home to modern women,
its empire thrives.33 What he cannot divine is that the old Islay is vanishing almost while he is speaking. At one point Islay, wearing her new
hat, finds herself in the hotel lobby together with her brother George
and another man named Batten, just arrived from Vienna. Islay steps
out for a moment, leaving the two men alone:
Do you know, your sister is looking splendid, Netherdale? Something
quite new about her, to my eye. The observant little Batten pretended to
a fine taste in female beauty.
Yes, this place suits her, and the life too. I think she has got a French hat
on this morning. That may make a difference.34

Islay then returns to the lobby, where she sees Madame dAvril preparing to leave the hotel for good, and offers her a farewell. Madame
dAvril instantly notes the change signalled by the new hat: Ah, Mademoiselle Nessadle, you agree with me? said the little French woman, with her foot on the step of the carriage and her eyes taking in the
details of Islays more scrupulous costume. You have grasped your
sceptre! whispered Madame, with a little pressure on Islays arm.35
The word sceptre recalls their earlier discussion: Islay is now a sultana, albeit still an incipient one. Madame dAvril then departs, only
for Hassan Bey to arrive a moment later and present Islay with an invitation to meet his family and observe their living arrangements. But
he utterly fails to notice the sartorial detail that has caught the eye of
both Batten and Madame dAvril. He notices not her new French hat,
but her old, black gown: The severity of her black gown, buttoned to
the neck and finished with its small-tucked muslin collar, pleased him
enormously, because he saw in it the expression of the solid, simple,
unartificial qualities he detected in her character.36
Once set in motion, the ensuing changes are inexorable. Islay returns to London and eschews typewriting. (She doesnt want to flatten
the ends of her fingers.) Her attention is now concentrated on clothes,
shopping, arranging flowers, and redecorating the flat. A few months
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later when Hassan Bey comes to London to visit her, he is frankly disappointed to learn that the austere figure whom he had idealized in
Istanbul has been replaced by a more conventional, more conventionally feminine woman. In a moment of poignant comedy, Hassan asks
whether he can take a photograph of Islay some morning when you
are at work, when you areat your typewriter? She cannot oblige.
He then suggests another photo, this one with her wearing the dress
in which I used to see you in Constantinople. Without missing a beat
the narrator reports: Her reply disappointed him not a little.37 Hassan soon returns to Istanbul, a disappointed lover. Islay, no less disappointed, is bewildered that her new, transformed appearance hasnt appealed to him. Do you mean to tell me that if a womans looks improve,
a mans interest in her ceases? she disbelievingly asks her old friend
Grahame Peel.38
Grahame gives an answer that weighs the earlier Islay against the
later Islay, the modern woman against the more conventional one
and she equivocates: It all depends upon what you want, and what
you want to be loved for.39 But Islay is dissatisfied, demanding a clearer response: But which is the real me? Grahame equivocates again,
but more subtly. She first suggests that the later, more feminine Islay
is a product of genetic inheritance, a fixed nature: From what I have
heard, you are your mothers daughter, and the character your education could only touch up and not change is coming out. But she then
adds another idea; Islay has changed as a result of circumstances, or
culture, and may do so yet again: There may be a third creature coming who will be, perhaps, the real you. Or perhaps only another you,
another set of qualities forced out by another application of artificial
light and heat.40 In this view, Islay has no fixed nature to realize,
only a changing set of qualities that can be forced out by changing
circumstances. Just then Islays brother turns up, abruptly ending the
conversation, and Islays question is left hanging.
Some readers will want to fill in that blank space left by the novels
ending, demanding a clear preference for the modern woman seen at
the books beginning or the postmodern postfeminist that she has become by its end. Yet doing so may replicate the limitations so apparent
in Islays take on aesthetics: If her attention were drawn to a sunset,
she would read in it the emblem of something or othernot a sunset.
The Crook of the Bough is a sunset of sorts, a form of witty divertissement. One must not try to turn it into a moral tract, an emblem of
something or other. That is not to say that it doesnt probe some engag-

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ing questions; but those very questions may be overlooked if we focus

solely on the disparity between Islay the New Woman and Islay the
new old woman. For both are quintessentially modern. The Islay who
is a secretary is immersed in the systemic operations of new communications and storage-and-retrieval technologies, operations that The
Crook of the Bough characterizes with the term mechanical. These
so permeate her being that they inform even the way she dresses, her
attempt to achieve elegance by mere mechanical sequence. But as a
distinctively modern figure, Islay also embodies the promise of modern freedom: an autonomous subject whose appetites for pleasure and
sensuous fulfilment are legitimated by modernity itself, by its promise
that new technologies such as the typewriter will ultimately enhance
individual agency and create a richer life-world. The Islay of the novels
later portions, in other words, may be more than a mere throwback to
an earlier form of femininity and instead may represent an extension
of the promise that remains only implicit in the earlier Islay. What she
cannot do is bring the two together in the same time and place: her
dividedness is quintessentially modern. She restages a contradiction
lodged within modernity, not outside or against it.

Miss Secretary Ethel

Miss Secretary Ethel differs from the other novels insofar as its intended readership is adolescent women.41 Its plot accordingly shuns
anything suggestive of sexuality. Not once in the book does Ethel Vincent, its heroine, encounter a male who is of a comparable age, nor even
ponder the prospect of doing so. Instead the novel dwells on her relationship with her employer Sir Edgar Allesley and the misunderstandings that prevent him from recognizing Ethels consummate virtues.
Ethel is eighteen and (like Juliet Appleton, Judith Danville, and Islay Netherdale) an orphan. But unlike them, she has been raised by a
friend of her father, Henry Conway, a liberal thinker and accomplished
scholar, whose wise and tender utterances, couched in pure literary
English, were the delight of an inner circle which loved no modern
writing save the best.42 He has just accepted the editorship of a literary review published in France and Ethel, in order not to be a burden
but also to stay in England, must support herself. Yet Ethel has always
anticipated and relished this moment. As Laura, Conways natural
daughter and Ethels adoptive sister, recalls: Do you remember how,
when we first began to understand that some day we might have to
earn our own living, you used to declare you never would be a govern-

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ess?you would be a private secretary, and nothing else! How Papa

laughed, when you told him, and requested him to give you a boys
education!43
As the novel opens, Ethel is waiting at the station for the train that
will take her away to her new life at Allesley Court, the country estate
of her employer, whose family has possessed it for more than five hundred years. In effect the novel stages a species of allegorical encounter:
can the new historical protagonist, the secretary, reach accommodation with an older historical order? At times the result is pure comedy,
whether intended or not; but such moments are carefully reintegrated
into a larger narrative pattern that follows the structure of domestic
melodrama, with some modifications to accommodate an adolescent
readership. Domestic melodramas often feature a heroine who is falsely thought to be promiscuous or untrue and conclude when misrecognition gives way to recognition. In Miss Secretary Ethel, these sexually
charged motifs are reconfigured to become the more generalized virtues that Ethel possesses in such abundance but which her employer
Sir Edgar fails to recognizeuntil its almost too late.
The plotting in the books earlier portions is decidedly episodic, but
held together by obvious thematic connections. When Sir Edgar is irritated into an act of discourtesy toward Ethel, she retreats to the
library/office that she shares with him. Noticing that the ink-pot on
Sir Edgars desk is quite low on ink, she decides to clean and fill it to
the brim, not knowing that he detests a full ink-pot and deliberately
keeps his low. When he next enters the office and mechanically resorts
to the ink-pot, he inevitably sticks his pen too deeply into it and gets
ink all over his fingers. Her helpfulness is seen as an uninvited ordering of his affairs.44 Even the narrator is forced to concede: It was true
that Ethel suffered from intermittent attacks of over-zeal, a polite way
of saying that Ethel is sometimes pushyperhaps very pushy.45 Consider the following dialogue, when Ethel gives Allesley some completed
work:
What is it? asked Allesley wearily, feeling himself incapable of any rebuke more energetic than a stare.
That thing you told me to do for you, replied Ethel, laying several closely
written sheets before him. The answer to that correspondent, and to the
tiresome editor-man. While youre reading it, may I just go and tell Lady
Allesley you want her to sit out with you? You do want her, dont you?
Sir Edgar made no reply. His eyes and thoughts were already occupied
with the papers in front of him.

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Very well, said Ethel, in a still, undisturbing voice. Then Ill tell her.46

Pushy indeed!
The novels culminating incident endows the idea of being pushy
with startling literalism. Sir Edgar Allesley is engaged in a close electoral contest for a seat in parliament. When circumstances force Ethel
to go to one small towns pre-election meeting and replace him as the
evenings speaker, he promptly fires her, mortified that she has made
him seem a fool who would let himself be represented by a mere girl.
The next morning she leaves Allesley Court and heads to London. But
later that same morning Allesley learns that her speech was a success, so well received that the towns representatives later agreed to
vote for him unanimously in the upcoming election, a result that will
give him the narrow margin he needs to win the closely fought contest.
Seeing his mistake, Allesley pursues Ethel to London, where he finds
her standing on a pavement just on the opposite side of the street. He
starts to cross over toward her when a hansom, drawn by a runaway
horse at full gallop, careens around the corner and bears down on him.
Then Ethels hands were on his chest, and the full force of the girls
strong arms flung him backward,47 or as a local passerby reformulates
it afterward: She see the orse a-comin, and you a-standin right in is
road; and she ups and pushes you out o the way, safe and sound!48
Ethels being pushy has not only won him his seat in parliament, but
saved his life. Now at last he recognizes her virtues and, since her adoptive father Henry Conway has died in the interim, he adopts her as his
daughter, allowing her to become a substitute for his natural daughter
Mabel who has died when sixteen some two years earlier.
It is a hazardous enterprise to tease political allegory out of a novel
written for teenage girls, but also irresistible. The traditional order
represented by Allesley Court and Sir Edgar can survive only to the
extent that it is willing to accept, even to adopt, the modern and, yes,
pushy style of the New Woman epitomised by Ethel Vincentindeed,
to view her ways as valid replacements for its own. All of which puts
still more pressure on another paradox at the heart of Miss Secretary
Ethel, a paradox never explicitly mentioned yet everywhere perceptible. Though Ethel can win the election for Sir Edgar Allesley, she herself could not vote in it even if she were twenty-one or more years old.

The term the New Woman was first used in an essay, written by
novelist Sarah Grand, that was published in the North American Re323

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view in March 1894. Two months later the same journal published a
polemical response by popular novelist Ouida, this one explicitly titled
The New Woman. Within months the phrase, typically printed with
capital letters, became a ubiquitous term of debate among journals of
the educated middle classes.49 On 1 September that same year a satirical play called The New Woman opened at the Comedy Theatre in
London, beginning a run that stretched to 173 performances and lasted
well into the next year.50 The play was still being performed in February 1895, when Grant Allen published The Woman Who Did, a work immediately taken to be a New Woman novel and one that promptly sold
over 25,000 copies in Britain alone, igniting still further debate.51 The
New Woman could designate both a historical reality, a set of actual
women whose views and lifestyles differed from conventional expectations, and a fictional reality, an ensemble of fictional women whose
outlooks and actions likewise differed. Their confluence produced a stereotyped image of the New Woman that was widely circulated: She
was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, rode a bicycle, insisted on
rational dress, and smoked in public.52 She was, in short, Juliet Appleton, the heroine of The Type-Writer Girl. But could the same claim be
advanced for Judith Danville, Islay Netherdale, or Ethel Vincent?
Only partially. Consider their education. Judith Danville and Islay
Netherdale are not Girton girls, but people whose education has been
acquired through private instruction. Yet that does not make them
significantly less educated. Judiths educational background is left
vague, the outcome of private tuition not further specified; while Islay,
instructed by a governess, has a fluent command of French and German that she deploys in making prcis on international affairs for her
brother, himself a graduate of Cambridge with only a modest command
of French. Ethel, instructed by her adoptive father Henry Conway, has
learned the ancient languages Latin and Greek, and her command of
Latin far exceeds that of her employer, Sir Edgar, who has no knowledge whatever of Greek. Tellingly, shortly after Ethel first arrives at
Allesley Court she is introduced to Sylvia Warren, only child of the
village rector and a first-year student at Girton; their mutual sympathy is instantaneous, and Ethel frankly avows her status as a Girton
wannabe: Ethel sigheda large, sympathetic regretful sigh. I wish I
could have gone to Girton!53 She has been prevented from doing so
only because of the comparative poverty of her adoptive father, a man
of letters.54 All three, though not Girton girls, possess educations that
are solid (Judith) or glaringly exceed those of their male employers

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(Islay, Ethel), while Ethel is befriended by a Girton girl and wishes she
could be one.
Yet beyond this point the similarities falter. None of the other heroines uses a bicycle; none adopts rational dress; and only Judith Danville,
at first a resolute nonsmoker (she had no words to express her disdain
of girls who smoked), ends up smoking on a very occasional basis (on
summer evenings to keep the midges off).55 True, such traits are only
superficial features extrapolated from a popular and stereotyped image of the New Woman. Islay Netherdale, after all, is plainly a variant
of a fictional New Woman, despite her lack of bicycle, cigarettes, or
rational dress (is her dowdy clothing simply a mainstream counterpart
to rational dress?). Perhaps it is a mistake to look for a unified set of attributes that constitute a fictional New Woman: the positions adopted
by New Women writers varied extremely, from the social purity views
of Sarah Grand to the franker eroticism of George Egerton. Yet that
does not mean that the heroines of these four novels do not share many
traits in commoneight, to be exact.
First, they are all typists or secretaries. Second, they are orphans.
Third, their deceased parents have belonged to the professional middle classes: Juliets father was an officer; Judiths a doctor; Islays a
solicitor; and Ethels adoptive father is a man of letters (were never
told what her natural father did before his death). Fourth, three of
them have grown up in villages or small towns (Juliet, Judith, and
Ethel), while the last was raised on the Continent with her governess.
But, fifth, more recently they have moved to the metropolis, to London.
Their journeys turn their stories into fables of modernity, allegories
of womens entry into the modern experience. Three reside and work
there (Juliet, Judith, and Islay), while the fourth (Ethel) immediately
goes there after being fired and, in the books final pages, in her role as
secretary to the newly elected MP Sir Edgar, returns to it as if to her
natural home. Sixth, all have significant amounts of education, as we
have seen. Seventh, three of the novels take pains to describe social occasions in which the heroine demonstrates that, notwithstanding her
status as an employee, she possesses the clothes and conduct of a lady.
Eighth, in three of the four novels the secretary-heroine also becomes
a published writer for the first time (Juliet, Judith, and Ethel), while
in the parable in reverse that is The Crook of the Bough Islay stops
being a writer, giving up her translations for her brother George. In
short, they share a great deal: an occupational category, family status
(orphanhood), and middle-class background; common origins in rural

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or small-town settings later replaced by a metropolitan one (London);

solid or high levels of educational attainment, often superior to those
of their male employers; an ideal ethical-social status as a lady; and
early literary aspirations and achievements. But do these heroines
traits suffice to constitute a previously unnoticed genre of secretarial
fiction?
Genre is a vexing term. We typically imagine it as an uneasy amalgam of traits or properties and formal features that lay out the rules
of the game, or that form a species of social contract with the reader.56
But if instead we view it, as Ralph Cohen has urged, as a grouping
[that] is a process, not a determinate category, a classification that is
empirical, not logical and hence open to modification and change (and
especially in the case of popular genres, to change through interaction
with contiguous or competing genres), then we can indeed discern the
rudiments of a distinctive genre emerging in these four novels.57 Like
the detective or the cowpuncher hero, the secretarial heroine requires
only some rudimentary props (a magnifying glass; a horse and gun; a
typewriter) and traits (orphanhood) before she can enter any one of
several story lines derived from other popular genres: the picaresque
tale of The Type-Writer Girl, the high-Victorian realism of A Bachelor
Girl in London, the fable-in-reverse of The Crook of the Bough, or the
modified domestic melodrama of Miss Secretary Ethel.
Consider four other British novels, all published between 1908 and
1922, all featuring a secretary as their principal protagonist.58 These
differ from the quartet we have so far examined in one major regard:
their heroines engage in consensual premarital sex and so become
fallen typists, allowing the novels to revisit the plotting and other
topoi that had informed Victorian novels about the fallen woman. Despite this major change, however, the heroines in three of them are
orphans, while the fourth is fatherless. When counted together with
those examined here, they yield a statistic both pseudoimpressive and
puzzling: published over a span of twenty-five years (18971922), eight
novels that feature a secretary as their protagonist also depict 100%
of them as fatherless and 87.5% of them as pure orphans. Fictional
fathers of fictional typists experience total annihilation, and their
spouses scarcely fare better. Yet the purport of this state of affairs is
not self-evident.
At the very least, it reinforces that conventional yet salutary warning that fiction seldom reflects or reproduces a given social reality in
unmediated fashion. Nobody will ever urge that for the span of twen326

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ty-five years all secretaries in the real world were either fatherless
or pure orphans. But it also might warn us against that other view
assigning fictional constructs, when juxtaposed with other social discourses (e.g., conduct books), a prescriptive force that urges readers to
live thus, however loosely thus is defined. For that assumption would
compel us to envision countless real-world secretaries who, once they
had read one or more of these novels, would proceed to plot the demise
of their parents. The convention stipulating that fictional typists be
orphans must be a more complex, perhaps contradictory amalgam.
Part of its force must stem from the long heritage of nineteenthcentury melodrama, which assigned women and orphans an exemplary status as emblems of innocence and vulnerability. Part of its
force must also derive from the nineteenth-century social convention
that proscribed work for middle-class women. To portray an educated,
middle-class woman at work, albeit in fiction, required not just motivation, but strong motivation: the precipitous death of parents was a
starting point. In a much broader framework, the demise of parents
and home could epitomize in drastic form those larger, more gradual
processes that sociologists such as Anthony Giddens have called the
disembedding mechanisms of modernity, the gradual uprooting of individuals from the here and now of the traditional and the locale and
their reinsertion into the more abstract, systemic relations of modernity, especially those of the marketplace.59 All true, these hypotheses:
but with one important qualification. In a sense, none of these heroines
is actually raised as an orphan: Juliet Appletons and Judith Danvilles
fathers die only months before the opening of the novels present, while
Ethel Vincents second or adoptive father, her guardian Mr. Conway,
doesnt die until midway through the book (chapter 7 of 12).60 This
distinctively belated form of orphanhood fulfils several fictional tasks:
it enables the heroine to receive a substantial education, breeding that
makes her a figure congenial to middle-class tastes, and it provides
strong motivation for her taking up work. Readers are free to emphasize either dimension: she works out of necessity, or she works because
she enjoys doing so. In either case, orphanhood also creates a solitary
heroine largely in charge of her own destiny, free of parental constraint,
pure agency. In an extreme formulation, she becomes the world of modernity incarnate. The price of admission to that world, for women in
secretarial fiction, is belated orphanhood, a prop as ubiquitous as that
of the horse and gun in the Western.

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That persistent horse and gun might remind us that secretarial fiction emerged at virtually the same time as the modern Western, codified in Owen Wisters The Virginian. Nobody has ever doubted the subject matter of the Western: relentlessly, even compulsively, it treats the
making of a man. Nobody can look at the configuration of features that
we have traced and doubt the subject matter of secretarial fiction: it
treats the making of a woman, one both modern and middle-class. To
juxtapose the Western with secretarial fiction might strike some as
fanciful or willful. Yet it would not have seemed so to Wister himself,
who set his novel in the late 1870s and early 1880s. When his narrator first introduces Molly Stark Wood, the only woman with character
enough to match that of the Virginian, he informs us that she, when
still living back east, had faced the decline in her familys fortunes
by adopting various occupationsteaching music, embroidering handkerchiefs, making preserves. But then he adds an intrusive comment:
That machine called the typewriter was then in existence, but the day
of women typewriters had as yet scarcely begun to dawn, else I think
Molly would have preferred this occupation to the handkerchiefs and
preserves.61 The making of a woman indeed, one who can tame the
only wilderness that counts: modernity.

Notes
1. For contemporaries The Type-Writer Girl (1897) was written by a woman, the Olive Pratt
Rayner whose name appears on its title page; but that was merely a pseudonym adopted by Grant
Allen (18481899), then the best known of the four writers treated in this essay because of the notoriety that had surrounded his earlier novel, The Woman Who Did (1895). Allen has recently been the
subject of a biography by Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing
Trade, 18751900 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), while The Type-Writer Girl
(London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1897) has recently been republished (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview,
2004), with an introduction by Clarissa Suranyi; further reference is to this more recent edition. For
critical discussion of the novel see Victoria Olwell, The Body Types: Corporeal Documents and Body
Politics Circa 1900, in Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell, eds., Literary Secretaries, Secretarial
Culture (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005).
2. The Type-Writer Girl, 53, 115.
3. Ibid., 24.
4. Ibid., 30.
5. Ibid., 31.
6. Ibid., 35.
7. Ibid., 55.
8. Ibid., 56.
9. Ibid., 58.
10. Ibid., 139.
11. Ibid., 139.
12. A Bachelor Girl in London (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1898) was the first novel of Geraldine
Edith Mitton (18681955), an author who later wrote two more novels, over twenty books of travel

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and description, as well as four biographies. She was the fifth and youngest child of Rev. Henry Arthur Mitton, master of Sherburn House Hospital in Durham; in 1920 she became the third wife of Sir
James George Scott (18511935), a former colonial administrator in Burma; see Patricia M. Herbert,
Scott, Sir James George, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her second novel was The
Gifts of Enemies (London: A. & C. Black, 1900), while her third The Cellar-House of Pervyse (London:
A. & C. Black, 1917) only appeared much later. Between these she wrote sixteen topographical books
about neighborhoods in London, all for Adam and Charles Black; her accounts of travel also took in
Touraine and Brittany (1901), Normandy (1905), Blacks Guide to Scotland, South-east (1907), Austria-Hungary (1914), and Cornwall (1915). In 1907 she published A Bachelor Girl in Burma (London:
A. & C. Black), an account of her travels in that country; she also wrote biographies of Jane Austen
(1905), Captain Cook (1927), Columbus (1927), and David Livingstone (1929). There has been no
previous critical discussion of the novel.
13. A Bachelor Girl in Burma, 54, 67.
14. Ibid., 62, 67.
15. Ibid., 66.
16. Ibid., 285.
17. Ibid., 339.
18. The Crook of the Bough (1898) was the second novel of Mnie Muriel Dowie (18671945), at the
time a celebrated New Woman writer who wrote only three novels in her brief career (after a very
public divorce in 1903, she stopped writing). For her biography see Helen Smalls Introduction to a
recent edition of Dowies first novel, Gallia (London: Everyman, 1995), xxvxliii; further references
to The Crook of the Bough are to the first and only edition (London: Methuen & Co., 1898). There has
been no previous critical discussion of it.
19. The Crook of the Bough, 6.
20. Ibid., 97.
21. Ibid., 99.
22. Ibid., 99100.
23. Ibid., 3940.
24. Ibid., 40, 41.
25. Ibid., 80, 133.
26. Ibid., 105106.
27. Ibid., 132.
28. Ibid., 133.
29. Ibid., 118.
30. Ibid., 121.
31. Ibid., 141.
32. Ibid., 9192.
33. Ibid., 94.
34. Ibid., 181.
35. Ibid., 183.
36. Ibid., 184.
37. Ibid., 268, 269.
38. Ibid., 297.
39. Ibid., 298.
40. Ibid., 29899.
41. Miss Secretary Ethel: A Story for Girls of To-day (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1898) was the
seventh novel for young women written by Ellinor Davenport Adams, who between 1889 and 1905
published sixteen such novels. Virtually nothing is known about her; an entry for her in The Encyclo-

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paedia of Girls School Stories, edited by Sue Sims and Hilary Clare (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate,
2000), does not even furnish her dates of birth and death. For a brief discussion of Miss Secretary
Ethel see Leah Price, From Ghostwriter to Typewriter: Delegating Authority at Fin de Sicle, in
Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the
Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21131,
especially 21820 and 22527.
42. Ibid., 38.
43. Ibid., 3.
44. Ibid., 64, 70.
45. Ibid., 71.
46. Ibid., 116.
47. Ibid., 23031.
48. Ibid., 23132.
49. Sarah Grand, The New Aspect of the Woman Question, North American Review, 158 (March
1894), 27076; reprinted in Carolyn Christensen Nelson, A New Woman Reader (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001), 14146; Ouida (Marie Louise de la Rame), The New Woman, North American Review, 158 (May 1894), 61019; also reprinted in A New Woman Reader, 15360.
50. Sidney Grundy, The New Woman (1894) has been reprinted first in Jean Chotha, ed., The New
Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), 159, then in
Nelson, A New Woman Reader, 297351.
51. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (London: John Lane, 1895). On its publication and the controversy, see Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875
1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14371.
52. Nelson, A New Woman Reader, ix.
53. Miss Secretary Ethel, 37.
54. Ibid., 37.
55. A Bachelor Girl in London, 34, 177.
56. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106, advances the notion of genres as social contracts between a writer
and a specific public.
57. Ralph Cohen, History and Genre, New Literary History, 17 (1986), 20319, here 204, 210.
58. Ernest Temple Thurston, Sally Bishop (London: Chapman & Hall, 1908); Ivy Low, The Questing
Beast (London: Martin Secker, 1914); Marjorie Grant, Latchkey Ladies (London: William Heinemann,
1921); Arnold Bennett, Lilian (London: Cassell, 1922). On these, see Lawrence Rainey, From the
Fallen Woman to the Fallen Typist, 19081922, ELT, 52.3 (2009), 27397.
59. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990),
2129.
60. Islay Netherdales case is confusing. At one point the text tells us: She had lost her mother
when she was four and then mentions her father, who had survived her [the mother] only a few
years (15). But it goes on to give an account of Islays education under Miss Seymours tutelage
(1617), a process so protracted it would seem to have lasted ten or even twelve years (making Islay
fourteen or sixteen), and so successful it prompts her father to propose to Miss Seymoura chronology at odds with the passing reference to her fathers death occurring only a few years after her
mothers.
61. Owen Wister, The Virginian, ed. Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 67.

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