Impressions // The Story of a Modern Woman by Ella Hepworth Dixon
‘All we modern women mean to help each other now.’
If I were rich enough to buy a million copies of this book and devote the rest of my life to leaving them scattered across tube station platforms, park benches and shopping centres à la Emma Watson, I would. Dixon’s text has, for reasons that utterly elude me, spent the best part of the past century out of mainstream print and has been republished only relatively recently, in this fantastic Broadview edition, which contains a thorough grounding in the context of the ‘New Woman’ phenomenon by way of Steve Farmer’s brilliant introduction, as well as a collection of reviews and essays from contemporary publications at the close. My first encounter with this novel actually took place a couple of years ago as part of a postgraduate class focusing on the Victorian Bildungsroman. There’s such scant information about Ella Hepworth Dixon available on the internet that it’s hardly a stretch to say that had it not been included on that particular module’s syllabus I would probably still be totally ignorant of her life and work, particularly as a student whose research interests have, up until now, tended towards the earlier half of the 19th century, only lightly skimming the ‘Woman Question’ debates that sprang up towards the later half.
