“A Woman's World”: Constructing the New Woman Author

AS A MAN WRITING ABOUT THE NEW WOMAN, Allen struggled to introduce himself into a book market directed at a female audience and dominated by female authors such as Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner. Before the publication of The Woman Who Did, Allen made an earlier, but unsuccessful, foray into popular women's fiction with For Maimie's Sake (1886). Featuring a woman bigamist, this novel was an early statement of unorthodox female sexuality. At this stage in his novel-writing career, Allen defined authorship as a trade rather than a calling. As he said in an 1893 interview with Raymond Blathwayt, “my line is to write what I think the public wish to buy, and not what I wish to say, or what I really think and feel” (72). Allen implies that it was a desire for financial gain rather than political fervor that motivated him to venture into the woman's book market and write For Maimie's Sake, a novel he described as “wicked” (73). In this interview, he also suggests an essential difference between male and female authors, a difference that prevents men from writing “wicked novels” with the same success as women:

Early in his novel-writing career, then, Allen genders the New Woman marketplace as female. He attributes his early commercial and critical failure as a male author participating in a woman's book market to gender difference. What is surprising and unexpected about his female gendering of New Woman authorship is the way in which he reverses typical Victorian gender norms. Describing the male author who ventures into the female literary sphere as an ingénue and a failure, he inverts gender norms by attributing this failure to men's natural modesty and innocence, two female-identified characteristics during this period. Well before The Woman Who Did, then, Allen began to conceive of authorship in gendered terms and view the New Woman's book market as a literary coterie in which men were unable to compete with female authors.

Before writing The Woman Who Did, Allen may have complained of being an outsider in the New Woman's book market, but he also attempted to claim a space for himself within it. In his 1889 essay “Plain Words on the Woman Question,” he first carved out a role for the male author in the women's movement. The essay focuses on men's role in the women's movement rather than on the women's movement. Drawing on the cultural authority of John Stuart Mill, the eminent mid-century advocate of women's emancipation, he places himself within a tradition of men writing on women's behalf and sets himself up against a “certain type of modern lady writers.” He suggests that he is better able to expose the “truisms” that women writers overlook (448) and better able to plead the cause of women's rights than women themselves:

As he believes he is one of the “few exceptional men” able to lead the movement, Allen portrays himself as a male version of the New Woman. He is not, however, her complement but her fiercest competitor. One way he asserts his difference from the New Woman is to cultivate a defiant masculinity. He vehemently defends the virility of men who participate in the women's movement: To emphasize the “virility,” “anger,” and “forc[e]” of male partisans of the women's movement, Allen suggests both uneasiness and defensiveness about their gendering. His construction of authorial identity as an “advanced man,” distinct from the New Woman, is therefore both a competitive strategy to gain access to a women's book market and a defensive response to threatened masculinity within the women's movement. E. Lynn Linton's 1892 essay “The Partisans of the Wild Women” accused all men “affiliated to the Wild Women and their cause” as being “themselves like women in all essentials of mind and character” (461). It was precisely the kind of cultural prejudice against which Allen had to defend himself. Before writing The Woman Who Did, Allen's attitude toward his authorial role as a New Woman writer was at best ambivalent: between 1886 and 1893, he fluctuated between timid and aggressive authorial self-posturings. It was out of this confusion about the male author's role in a women's book market that Allen's The Woman Who Did emerged.

By the time Allen wrote The Woman Who Did, nearly a decade after For Maimie's Sake, he evinced the same anxieties about gendered authorship. In this work, his second fictional undertaking on the subject of the Woman Question, he figures the male author as a competitor rather than a failure and as a visionary rather than an entrepreneur. In other words, he constructs his authorial image into one that allows for male participation in a female-dominated market. In so doing, however, he betrays uneasiness. On the one hand, he encourages the reader to identify him with his protagonist, Herminia, a New Woman who like him also happens to be a novelist. On the other hand, although he appears to align himself with his New Woman protagonist, he simultaneously distances himself from her, introducing inconsistencies in his feminism that have perplexed and infuriated readers of all types. Also, as a further attempt to dissociate himself from the New Woman, he cultivates the idea of the male author as a New Man, possibly as a defensive response to the threat to masculinity in the women's movement. Put simply, Allen's anxieties manifest themselves in his inconsistent authorial positioning as New Woman partisan, New Woman detractor, and New Man visionary.

One of the most striking features of The Woman Who Did is its conflation of author and protagonist. By conflating himself with Herminia, Allen not only identifies himself as sympathetic to the New Woman cause but also subsequently feminizes himself. Nowhere is this alignment between author and protagonist more apparent than in chapter 13, when Herminia writes her first novel. The correspondences between Herminia's career path and Allen's are numerous. Between doing hackwork and raising her infant girl, Herminia writes her own New Woman novel. This novel, entitled A Woman's World, is a “blankly pessimistic” account of “the experiences and beliefs and sentiments of a martyred woman.” Herminia sends her manuscript to a publisher “in fear and trembling” but finally finds one who “sympathized with thinkers” to publish her book (96; ch. 13). The reviewers, however, are indifferent to her novel. With the exception of the Spectator, which denounces its politics but recognizes its “gleam of pure genius” (97), her novel passes unnoticed.

When describing Herminia's undertaking as New Woman novelist, Allen is describing his own experience with The Woman Who Did. Like Herminia, Allen's career began with hackwork followed by a significant political novel. He too wrote a desolate novel about a martyred woman. Herminia's novel A Woman's World is “earnestly and sincerely written” (97); so was Allen's: he boldly announces in his epigraph to The Woman Who Did that he writes “wholly and solely to satisfy [his] own taste and conscience” (22). Like Herminia, Allen also confronted the same publishing difficulties. Before his manuscript was accepted by John Lane, it was repeatedly rejected. In the face of these rejections, Allen even made plans to preserve the manuscript in the Bodleian, lest it be forgotten (Clodd 154). To some extent, Allen's representation of Herminia's novel writing even anticipates the critical reception of Allen's own novel. Although his novel proved to be far more successful than Herminia's, the Spectator reviewed The Woman Who Did in the same manner as Allen envisioned it receiving Herminia's A Woman's World. The Spectator called it “strong and impressive” but questioned its polemical–if unsuccessful–support of free love (432).

In the same chapter, Allen finds another way to align himself with Herminia by feminizing the novel genre. As his narrator in The Woman Who Did explains, women are “naturally” gifted at writing novels:

Whereas the narrator attributes treatises and sermons to men, he ascribes novel writing to women. The domestication of novel writing also genders such writing female. Herminia's novel is represented as noncommercial, composed during her leisure hours “for her baby's sake, on waste scraps of paper, at stray moments snatched from endless other engagements” (96). With these repeated references to novel writing as a female-gendered activity, performed in between naptimes and diaper changes, Allen strangely forces the reader to confront the fact that he is participating in a female genre, one even belittled as a “pet” enterprise.

This chapter on Herminia's novel writing is one of the most self-reflexive moments in the novel, for Allen uses Herminia as a mouthpiece for his own meditations on authorship and publication. His cross-gendered identification with his protagonist not only suggests his empathy with the woman writer but also feminizes authorial identity. In his choice of a female protagonist to echo his own literary career, Allen appears to conceive of his role as New Woman author as gendered female. Moreover, by feminizing the act of writing the novel, Allen necessarily calls into question the gender of the male novelist. Endeavoring to sell himself as a New Woman novelist in an impenetrable market, he participates in a series of gendered cross-identifications that strategically elide the fact of his sex.

Yet, while Allen performs these gender inversions by conflating himself with Herminia and participating in activities that he genders female, he also distances himself from these associations. If, on the one hand, he is a partisan of the New Woman, he is, on the other hand, her subtle detractor. His opening dedication first shows how he casually disaligns himself with the causes he putatively supports on the following page in his epigraphal commitment statement. His dedication reads: “To my dear wife to whom I have dedicated my twenty happiest years I dedicate also this brief memorial of a less fortunate love” (21). In a novel that advocates free union and castigates marriage, the author's dedication to his wife is out of place. His book may endorse advanced ideas, but he distances himself from them by reminding his readers of his own conservative lifestyle. His dedication reads as a preemptive defense against critics ready to malign his own way of life. In the same way that the dedication and epigraph play off against each other to convey contradictory messages about Allen's authorial stance, so too do the two lines of the Preface that introduce the novel: “‘But surely no woman would ever dare to do so,’ said my friend. ‘I knew a woman who did,’ said I; ‘and this is her story’” (23). The politics and gender identity of the speakers in the Preface are ambiguous. They could be two scandalized women in conversation or, just as likely, two men at a club titillating themselves with lewd thoughts. By obscuring the identity, and therefore the sensibilities, of these speakers, Allen gives scope to moral conservatism and sexual titillation at the same time. In so doing, he obfuscates his own authorial allegiances.

In addition to the prefatory material, the novel's internal inconsistencies upset Allen's alliance with the women's movement. Throughout, his identification with the New Woman is accompanied by marked resistance. The uneasy movement in narrative voice from third-person omniscient to first person, for example, suggests a slippage in allegiance and perspective. During the proposal scene in chapter three, the narrative voice shifts from direct engagement with the thoughts of the characters to an independent voice ready for soliloquy. The narrator, whom Allen makes every effort in his prefatory material to conflate with himself, engages directly with an imagined audience with such comments as “you will admit” and “that is how nature has made us.” He also asserts his own opinion, using idioms such as “to my mind” (37; ch. 3). This shift in narrative voice disrupts the direct engagement between narrator and character, allowing room for authorial distance and even opposition.

Another way in which Allen opposes his identification with the New Woman and her cause is to resist his feminization. While he elsewhere genders novel writing as female and thus feminizes himself by virtue of being a novelist, he alternatively genders the narrative voice in The Woman Who Did as male. At one point, the narrator identifies himself with Alan Merrick, Herminia's lover, asking “is it not for that [protecting women]…that nature makes us virile?” and concluding “we must shield the weaker vessel” (48; ch. 4; emphasis added). The similarity between Allen's name and that of his male protagonist extends the identification between narrator and protagonist further to author and protagonist. Finally, as a further means to resist feminization and to gender his narrative voice male, Allen frequently allows it to sermonize in order to bring his book back into the proscribed sphere of male literary activity by making it more like a treatise than a novel.

On the basic level of plot, however, Allen shows his most serious disaffection with the New Woman movement. As the recent scholarship on the novel has noticed, Allen's feminism appears to fail itself. The novel's essentialist remarks about women's instinctive passivity and natural maternalism undercut its description of an advanced woman: “It is a woman's ancestral part to look up to a man” (77; ch. 9); “the male [is] active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and receptive” (64; ch. 7); “every good woman is by nature a mother” (94; ch. 13); a woman is “rudderless” without a man. Once Alan dies, Herminia's “mission…fails” (94); her daughter, Dolly, wants to conform to conventional models of femininity, to “dress in pretty clothes, be admired by gentleman, and marry” (Stubbs 118), and Herminia eventually commits suicide. Allen may suggest his identification with the New Woman elsewhere in the novel, but these gross inconsistencies in narrative voice and plot development reveal the ways in which he also dissociates himself from her.

If his ambivalence about his authorial role is reflected in his simultaneous identification and disidentification with the New Woman and her cause, it is equally manifest in his construction of himself as an “advanced man.” As he revisits the idea that he introduced in his earlier essay “Plain Words” –that he was one of the “few exceptional men” able to lead the women's movement–Allen experiments with the idea of the New Man in The Woman Who Did. Although he never adopts the term New Man, opting instead for “advanced man,” the term was coined by Punch as early as October 1894 to refer to a masculine type constructed around the New Woman phenomenon. In Allen's novel, it is the figure of a secular prophet that he briefly introduces as his New Man. Evangelical rhetoric is pervasive throughout this sermon-like novel: it is first present in his epigraph where he admits that he writes “wholly and solely to satisfy [his] own taste and [his] own conscience,” but it is also often linked with Allen's sometime surrogate, Herminia. She preaches from a hill-top (34; ch. 2); she is Christ-like in “the sacrifice she was willing to make for humanity” (49; ch. 4); she is a “martyr to humanity” and “like some saint of the middle ages”; and she ultimately represents “the church of the future” (140; ch. 24). The secular prophet figure is germinal in the novel, introduced tentatively to construct a masculine identity still linked to and even articulated through the New Woman. It is in the post-novel aftermath, when he must defend himself against charges of effeminacy and immorality, that Allen aggressively adopts the figure of the New Man to discover a distinct place for the male New Woman author.

Allen's conflicted representation of authorship in The Woman Who Did suggests uneasiness about his incursion into what he perceives as a women's book market, but it also reveals an exploratory rejoinder to insinuations of effeminacy. Essentially his inconsistent ties with the New Woman as well as his tentative self-creation as a New Man prophet show how his support of the women's movement is undercut by a sense of threatened masculinity. This curious blend of sympathy and uneasiness produces an ironic incongruity between Allen's theory and practice: as much as he professes to be concerned with the women's movement, he is perhaps more concerned with finding a place for the male author.

“The Unregenerate Man”: Contemporary Critical Responses

THE WOMAN WHO DID WAS AN ENORMOUS CRITICAL AND financial success for Allen. Whether or not they liked the book, his contemporaries agreed that it was important. W. T. Stead, in an early review of the novel in Review of Reviews (1895), called it “the book of a lifetime” (177). Advertisements for the book at the back of each volume of the Keynote Series capitalized on the controversy and notoriety surrounding it. They included excerpted reviews from the periodical press that denounced the novel's politics but acknowledged its significance: “Though I dislike and disbelieve in his gospel, I thoroughly respect Mr. Grant Allen for having stated it so honourably and bravely” (Academy); “Even its bitterest enemies must surely feel some thrill of admiration for its courage” (Sketch); “It may not merit praise, but it merits reading” (Saturday Review). The most fascinating aspect of the novel's reception, however, was the way in which reviewers and biographers responded to Allen's problematic authorial representation. Critics with different political perspectives commented on Allen's association with the New Woman and her cause, some viewing him as sympathetic, others seeing him as adversarial, and still others perceiving him as fickle. Critics also commented on his representation of himself as the male prophet of the women's movement, a self-characterization that he enthusiastically adopted for himself after publishing his novel. While some believed in his authorial posturing as New Man visionary, others described it as a commercial enterprise or castigated it as effeminate and degenerate. These varying responses not only reveal the uneasy contradictions that underlie Allen's construction of male authorship but also offer insight into a literary market that remunerated the New Man author and yet was also deeply hostile toward him.

Reviewers who saw Allen as a partisan of the women's movement were inclined to conflate him with Herminia and adopted different perspectives on this alliance depending on their political views. Stead, noting the correspondence between Allen and Herminia's career paths, regards Herminia as Allen's mouthpiece: he sees Allen as “speaking of his heroine…in terms which are undoubtedly suggested by his own experience” (177) and “speaking of his own book under the disguise of his heroine's solitary novel” (178). If Stead used biography to read Allen's novel, other critics used the novel to infer Allen's biography. Many critics assumed that because Allen wrote about an unconventional heroine, he himself led an unconventional life. As Edward Clodd, Grant's biographer, explained, the world “argued that a man who attacked the institution of marriage and defended free love must be a libertine; it declared that his separation from his wife was notorious, whereas the fact is that he is never happy on the rare occasions that he is away from her” (162). While Allen's detractors searched for turpitude, his supporters inevitably defended his personal life. William Chislett, one of Allen's later biographers, defended Allen against such charges of notoriety. He suggests that “if [Allen's] muse was wanton in this book, his life was pure” (203). In so doing, he conflates Allen with Herminia by implying their professional closeness as author and muse, while simultaneously distancing them by emphasizing their personal difference as saint and harlot. Chislett maintains the same kind of precarious balancing act that Allen himself develops throughout his novel.

Other critics objected to this balancing act. Some critics stressed the alliance between Allen and the women's movement, whereas others noticed the estrangement. Stead, though he comments on the apparent sympathy between author and protagonist, also writes that “Mr Grant Allen's book brings more clearly into relief than any other novel of recent times the fundamental argument against his own doctrine” of free union (178). The Spectator, perhaps influenced by Stead's review, similarly argues that “the course and the denouement of the novel are simply a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrines which the book is clearly written to support” (431). While Stead and the conservative reviewer for the Spectator found it “fortunate” (432) that the novel undermined its own promotion of women's emancipation, contemporary avant-gardes and women's rights activists were quick to denounce Allen's ambivalent feminism. H. G. Wells, remembering years later the book that “everybody bristled at,” reveals how “this hasty, headlong, incompetent book seemed like a treason to a great cause” (549). Sarah Grand, Allen's competitor in the New Woman book market, said in an interview with Sarah Tooley of the Humanitarian (1896) that Allen wanted women “to return to the customs of the poultry yard” (168).

Likewise, in an essay for the Contemporary Review (1895), suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett found Allen's political message confusing, debating at first whether the novel was in earnest or “an elaborately worked-up satire” (627). Noting that Allen “purports to be writing in support of the enfranchisement of women” (629), she questions his stance by revealing his protagonist's inadequacies as a leader of the women's movement. She rails against Herminia for her lack of “real individuality or independence,” her inability to recover after the death of her lover, and her decision to lie about her marital status and her daughter's illegitimacy (627). She reveals the disjunction between Allen and the New Woman by showing that he is unable to create the consummate New Woman, only a sanctimonious and “ineffabl[y] priggish” version of her (628). Fawcett also expresses concern about the gap between “profession and practice” in Allen's work, focusing on what she perceives to be the deceptive nature of Allen's self-representation as women's rights advocate. She points out that while Allen may “purport to be writing in support of the enfranchisement of women,” his record of service to the cause does not support such claims: “Mr. Grant Allen has never given help by tongue or pen to any practical effort to improve the legal or social status of women” (629). Fawcett thus vehemently condemns Allen: “He is not a friend but an enemy” to feminism (630).

In the same way that there was a mixed response to Allen's representation of himself as a New Woman partisan, there was also a mixed response to his posturing as a New Man prophet. These critics were responding not only to the hints of such an authorial persona in The Woman Who Did but especially to Allen's aggressive intensification of such hints after he had published the novel. As Keating notes, with this novel, Allen “took upon himself the role of spokesman for what he called ‘The New Hedonism’ and ‘Hill-top’ purity, much-debated and short-lived catch phrases” (189). In a letter to an acquaintance who refused him hospitality after the scandal of The Woman Who Did, for example, Allen elaborated his role as inspired spokesman for the New Woman: “I am working for the establishment of a higher, nobler, and purer society than any yet contemplated on earth” (Clodd 168). However, his Introduction to The British Barbarians (1895), where he states his authorial principles, describes his role as preacher-novelist most clearly (and pompously). Here, he introduces the metaphor of the novelist evangelizing from the hill-top and likens himself to “the preacher of righteousness who addresses humanity” (xvi). Among his literary coterie, Allen also cultivated this representation of himself, signing the flyleaf of Clodd's copy of The Woman Who Did with “This my Evangel” (155). Allen constructed himself, as a latter-day Prophet, an evangelist of the “truth” and “automatic mouthpiece” for the age (xxiii). By thus aggrandizing his authorial role, Allen rescued the male New Woman author from attacks of effeminacy and infirmity and also carved out a place for the male author in the New Woman literary market. In a sense, the New Woman is not the subject of Allen's work, but rather its instrument. With her help, he attempts to elaborate a new style of fin-de-siècle male authorship that is powerfully reminiscent of the Carlylean man of letters from earlier in the century.⁶

A number of critics recommended this new style of authorial identity and even adopted Allen's evangelical tone when speaking about him. In his biography, Clodd preserves and elaborates Allen's self-representation as New-Man prophet, suggesting, for example, that “it was with the ardour of a Paul or a Francis Xavier that [Allen] proclaimed his gospel of freedom between man and woman” (155). Clodd may have been among the most sincere, but he was not alone in perpetuating this image of Allen as preacher-novelist. Stead's review also uses religious language to describe Allen and his work. He compares The Woman Who Did to the Revelation of St. John the Divine and describes Allen alternatively as “one of the great lay preachers of the press” and “the fervent apostle of free love” (177). Stead's inflated rhetoric suggests satire, and indeed, he ridicules what he saw as Allen's misguided views about sexual freedom throughout his review; however, he also applauds the man as an “able and earnest writer” (178) and, like other reviewers (see The Spectator 431), seems genuinely impressed by Allen's prefatory inscription of moral commitment.

Critics other than Clodd and Stead, however, viewed Allen's strident evangelism as disingenuous. Wells, for example, adopts Allen's evangelical tone only to criticize it. “And the gospel Mr. Grant Allen…is preaching,” Wells asks bluntly, “what is it?” (550). Wells invokes this image of Allen as preacher to suggest the confusion and hollowness behind his gospel. Wells was not the only critic to question the earnestness behind Allen's authorial representation as preacher-novelist. Richard Le Gallienne, Allen's biographer and friend, suggested that Allen deliberately marketed himself in this way. However, where Wells criticized Allen for the vacuity of his gospel, Le Gallienne, a true decadent, lauds Allen's earnest self-posturing for its style and its commercial genius. As he writes, “Allen had a really enviable faculty of provoking the world to throw stones” (16). The language of commerce and ethics also mingle in Le Gallienne's description of Allen's authorial representation in and around The Woman Who Did to suggest that one informed the other for Allen. He describes the book as a “poster of rebellion” and “an advertisement of an idea” that is so successful because it banks on “the moral idea it advertised” as well as the “single-minded and pure-of-heart” (16). In other words, what Le Gallienne intimates about Allen, and certainly admires about him, is that his construction of himself as a preacher-novelist was as much a commercial phenomenon as it may have been sincerely felt. As Stetz argues, Lane's Keynote Series was concerned with selling status and sex (81), but as Le Gallienne reveals, The Woman Who Did was also interested in advertising a new kind of authorial identity for men–one predicated on sincerity, earnestness, and moral commitment. Wells may have criticized the incoherence of Allen's preacher-novelist, but Le Gallienne perceived that the idea sold; there was a market for this New Man.

Some critics saw Allen's New Man evangel as merely disingenuous, but others saw it as obnoxious. In the tradition of Linton (whose earlier essay on male partisans of the “wild women” has already been mentioned), a number of critics from the periodical presses felt that there was still no place for men in the women's movement. Fawcett argued most vehemently on the grounds of gender against Allen's participation in New Woman's literature:

Fawcett suggests that Allen's purpose is to titillate men rather than emancipate women. Her chief objection to his authorial interference in New Woman literature is that he is less concerned about the New Woman than he is about the New Man. For Fawcett, then, this New Man is nothing less than an “unregenerate man” (631). Where Fawcett undermined Allen's authorial identity as New Man evangel because it serves men's interests rather than women's, Margaret Oliphant objected to it because it enfeebles men. In an 1896 essay contributed to Blackwood's entitled “The Anti-Marriage League,” Oliphant argues that Allen's preachings are directed at a female audience but at a cost to men: “The woman is the being for whom emancipation is sought…but I confess that it is the man who now, it seems to me, has the best right to the sympathies of the just and charitable” (148). She argues that Allen's preachings have helped make the man “a poor creature upon the most insecure footing” (149). Hugh Stutfield, another contributor for Blackwood's in 1895, argued in a similar conservative vein as Oliphant but emphasized the idea that the “male coadjutors” of the New Woman effeminized themselves as well as their fictional male characters. In Stutfield's piece, he repeatedly characterizes New Woman male authors such as Allen as effeminate and emasculated. He believes that the influence of “social anarchists” like Allen resulted in the encroachment of “flaccid,” “weakened,” and “sterile times,” with the “inevitable effect of sapping masculinity” (842).

Whereas Fawcett objected to the reassertion of conventional gender roles and the primacy of the male in Allen's New Woman fiction, Oliphant and Stutfield argued for preservation of conventional gender roles. Yet although they objected on different political grounds to Allen's foray into women's literary territory, they agreed that the male author did not have a place in New Women's writing. Each objected in a different way to Allen's curious assertions of masculinity in New Woman fiction, not only revealing anxieties about gender incursions and inversions but also showing the multiple ways in which gendered identities were understood and deployed during the Victorian period, especially at the end of the century, when gender categories were hotly contested.

“The Woman Who Wouldn't Do”: Punch and Parody

CRITICS LIKE FAWCETT, STUTFIELD, AND OLIPHANT SHOW that while contemporary reactions to Allen's construction of authorial identity varied considerably, they shared a fascination with Allen's gender. Whether concentrating on his relationships with the New Woman or the New Man, Allen's critics were preoccupied with the conspicuous involvement of a male author in the New Woman novel genre. “The Woman Who Wouldn't Do” (1895), an anonymous article published in Punch or The London Charivari, is no exception to this rule (Figure 4 and Figure 5). Punch was a prominent forum for late-Victorian commentary on the New Woman phenomenon. In articles and cartoons printed throughout the 1890s, contributors examined the involvement of women in such stereotypical New Woman activities as cycling and smoking.⁷

The results were uniformly conservative and, at times, highly disparaging. In the middle years of the decade, the New Woman novel became a regular target of Punch's derision. The year before publication of Allen's novel, 1894, witnessed the production and publication of parodies of two New Woman novels, Egerton's Keynotes (1893) and Iota's The Yellow Aster (1894).⁸ Appearing in March of 1895, “The Woman Who Wouldn't Do” was the third installment in a series of Keynotes-inspired lampoons, the first in a series of titles that responded to Allen's text by employing a “Women Who–” formula.⁹ It combines stylistic imitations with attacks on Allen's political and ideological messages.

Anxieties surrounding gender and authorship play an important role in this process. Specifically, the Punch parody reflects a range of concerns about Allen's involvement as a male author in literary campaigns for the New Woman and her platform. In this sense, Punch has a great deal in common with the likes of Fawcett and Stutfield. The piece differs, however, in its attempts to discredit Allen's involvement in this genre by focusing on such aspects of New Woman authorship as commercial profitability and the notion that the New Woman was first and foremost a literary construct. Of course, the primary difference between the Punch piece and the work of other critics is its extensive use of humor. The result is an entertaining and effective attack on the credibility and legitimacy of the male New Woman novelist and his work.

The title, “The Woman Who Wouldn't Do,” makes the parodic character of the piece immediately apparent. Readers who were familiar with the novel or with Allen's larger body of work would have been quick to recognize the article's imitation of Allen's writing style. The piece mimics his cumbersome vocabulary, his tendency to write in the style of a guidebook, and his fascination with botanical and geological terms. Readers of the novel would also have recognized Punch's re-presentation of two of the most memorable passages from The Woman Who Did: a description of the South Downs landscape which appears on the first page of the novel and a key courtship scene between Herminia Barton and Alan Merrick from chapter 5. In this scene, Herminia and Alan reveal their feelings for one another and begin to negotiate the terms of their unconventional union. Punch's rendition of the meeting between the two lovers differs from the original in a number of significant ways. For instance, Punch replaces Alan Merrick with “Perugino Allan,” a figure who functions as a caricature not of Alan Merrick but of his creator, Grant Allen. In making this change, Punch draws on Allen's own representation of an alignment between himself and Merrick. Their names (Allan/Allen) suggest this alignment, but it is also implied by a series of more subtle connections. These include the author's and the male protagonist's common experience of the city of Perugia as a site of creative productivity. In his epigraph, Allen identifies the novel as having been “written at Perugia/Spring 1893” (22). Merrick similarly “loved” Perugia and sketches the city, describing it as “such a capital place for sketching” (76; ch. 9). Of course, Allen and Merrick's shared support for moral reform and their commitment to the cause of female emancipation are the most significant links between them. By replacing Merrick with “Perugino Allan,” Punch highlights these connections, using them to position Allen within a parodic version of a setting and scene that he had created.

Punch also refashions Herminia Barton who emerges in the context of the parody as “Pseudonymia Bampton.” Herminia's renaming as “Pseudonymia” comments on the duplicitous nature of Herminia's self-representation and on the related failure of her program of martyrdom and moral reform. It responds, more specifically, to her use of the pseudonyms Mrs. Alan Merrick and Mrs. Barton in the course of the novel in order to represent herself falsely as a married woman and a widow. The name “Pseudonymia” also highlights Herminia's professional identity as an author by invoking her use of the pen name Miss Montague when she publishes her New Woman novel. This is in keeping with the larger piece's focus on authorship, a focus introduced in the first paragraph:

Both the replacement of Merrick with “Perugino Allan” and the renaming of Herminia announce a change in the thematic focus of the scene. What was originally a coming together of two young lovers, Punch reconfigures into a meeting between an author and his female protagonist. At the same time, the reference to a “community of literary instincts” draws attention to the fact that the encounter takes place between a male New Woman novelist and a female New Woman novelist. Significantly, the reference to a bond based on commonly held “literary instincts” emphasizes authorship over any kind of erotic or romantic attraction. The overall effect is an increased emphasis on gender, authorship, and its relation to the New Woman cause.

To be more specific, the reference to a “community of literary instincts” highlights the common professional ground existing between the two author figures. The sense of “community” implied by this statement is immediately problematized, however, by the conversation that takes place between Pseudonymia and Perugino in the remainder of the article. This conversation emphasizes the gender of its two participants and the impact which gender has on their perspectives and writing. For instance, when Perugino arrives at the meeting place, Pseudonymia welcomes him with the following proclamation:

Pseudonymia's statement genders New Woman novel authorship in a number of different ways. To begin with, Pseudonymia perceives Perugino as a “real man,” apparently for having written a book for the politically progressive Keynotes Series, a series of books decorated with key-shaped designs on the spines and back covers.¹⁰ Significantly, the “real man” reference echoes Allen's own description of Herminia and Alan Merrick's first meeting. In chapter one of The Woman Who Did, the narrator explains: “they read one another perfectly. For he was true man, and she was real woman” (27; ch. 1). In the parody, the grounds upon which Pseudonymia reaches this conclusion, specifically, Perugino's authorship of an apparently preachy and contradictory New Woman novel, suggest Perugino's failure to deserve this moniker. Allen, the real New Woman author, is slighted by extension and by the parodic echoing of his own language. Indeed, in the topsy-turvy, tongue-in-cheek world of parody, the phrase “real man” implies that Perugino/Allen is anything but.

The passage is also significant for the way in which it figures Pseudonymia as a reader, defining her position in relation to Perugino as that of a consumer and admirer of his literary output. Both her initial compliment and her subsequent request for “some more beautiful things” position her as a recipient of his work and opinions. The passage evokes a gendered division between author and reader, differentiating the “real man” author from the woman that he addresses. Of course, the passage also criticizes Allen's writing style, targeting both the melodramatic and verbose quality of the novel. The final line, “Talk straight on, please, pages at a time,” lampoons the treatise-like nature of the novel and the lengthy philosophical speeches made by both its protagonist and its narrator. More importantly, however, the passage characterizes the involvement of a male author in the New Woman movement as laughable. Perugino, who lectures a woman on an issue “so loathing to [her] sex,” is at best an interfering and arrogant figure; at worst he is a self-serving schemer.

Although the passage initially represents Pseudonymia as a reader, her experiences as an author are targeted later when she questions Perugino about his career. She begins by asking Perugino about the differences between his most recent novel and the books that preceded it. She asks about the years that it has taken for him to put his anti-marriage sentiments into print. Perugino's response functions as an attack on Allen's self-representation as an advocate and activist for moral reform:

Perugino's reference to the divorce of “profession and practice” draws attention to the disparity between Allen's advocacy of free-love and his own marriage. The passage also problematizes Allen's authorial self-representation by evoking his existing canon. Of course, Perugino's reference to his decision to write “for once solely to satisfy my own taste and conscience” is an unambiguous echo of Allen's preface to the novel. The passage targets both the pomposity of Allen's claim and his previous failure to achieve this level of integrity. It elaborates on the implications of his statement by making reference to such mundane and material aspects of authorship as the pressure to please audiences and the necessity of earning a living. In general, the passage highlights both connections and disparities between Allen's life and his professed beliefs and the books that he has published. The overall result is an undermining of Allen's credibility as a progressive New Woman novelist.

When Pseudonymia hears Perugino's reasons for delaying the publication of his book, she considers her own experiences as an author and the way in which her situation differs from that of Perugino. Her reaction draws attention to the extent to which the different experiences of Allen and his novel-writing female protagonist are gendered. Specifically, Pseudonymia responds to Perugino's proclamations about the publication of a risqué novel with the observation, “As the physically weaker vessel, I could only have done it under an assumed name” (153). The statement is a subtle attack on Allen's decision to have his female protagonist seek the shelter of a pseudonym when he published his novel in his own name. The statement is also an accurate reflection of the fact that many female New Woman novelists published under pen names. Allen is an exception to the rule, an exception whose gender allows him to do away with the use of a pseudonym, a luxury not enjoyed by his “physically weaker” female protagonist or the women writers which she represents. Once again, Punch is highlighting the significance of gender for the authorship of New Woman novels.

The final stages of the Punch parody portray Allen's relation to female New Woman authors in an even less flattering light. Toward the end of their conversation, Perugino asks Pseudonymia to stand in as a kind of surrogate for him in the anti-marriage campaign. His request comments on the self-reflexive dimensions of Allen's novel, characterizing Herminia as a mouthpiece for Allen and his views. In light of this request, the name Pseudonymia takes on another possible meaning, one in which Herminia figures as a kind of pseudonymous stand-in for Allen and his anti-marriage views. It also depicts Herminia as a kind of martyr for a cause in which Allen is unwilling to become directly involved. Perugino explains to Pseudonymia:

This is not a positive representation of the participation of a male author in the New Woman genre. What is most interesting about Perugino's appeal is the way in which it characterizes the relationship between the male author and his female protagonist as exploitative. The passage mocks the involvement of male authors in the literary dimension of the New Woman movement, designating this involvement as partial, limited, and inadequate. As a male author, Allen may reflect on this issue from a distance, representing it in fiction, but he can choose not to undergo the “inconvenience” involved in any kind of personal or direct involvement in the cause. He can, in fact, use his gender as an excuse for not acting as a “high example” for women. Unlike Herminia, who pairs the authorship of a New Woman novel with a lifestyle that is consistent with these values, Allen represents and promotes a radical change but is unwilling to live by these principles. Punch targets this discrepancy, presenting Allen as self-interested, ignoble, and contemptible. In the process, the piece presents the position of the male author/commentator on New Woman issues as both privileged and limited; the perspective that it affords is at best that of a necessarily far-removed onlooker.

The parody draws to an abrupt and somewhat surprising conclusion once Perugino has made this request. In a surprising but fitting twist, Perugino learns that Pseudonymia is not an eligible candidate because, unbeknownst to him, she is, in fact, married. Pseudonymia's revelation combines a parody of Allen's melodramatic dialogue with commentary on the nature of New Woman authorship:

The title of the parody foreshadows Perugino's reaction to this revelation; he gives Pseudonymia up explaining, “You are, I grieve to think, a woman who won't do” (153). Ignorance and conflict characterize his relationship to his novel-writing protagonist. The breakdown in their relationship identifies Allen as a hypocrite, as someone who expects something of others that he fails to do himself. The idea of an author lacking basic knowledge of his own protagonist contributes to the comic effect of this critique. To some extent, the sexual and romantic character of the novel's original courtship scene lingers here as the proposed professional union of a man and woman is prevented by their heterosexual partnership with others.

What is most damaging about this closing passage is the extent to which it expresses skepticism about the character of both male and female New Woman authors. The exchange identifies both men and women with a split between theory and practice, accusing them of living lives in which “profession” is “divorced from practice” (153). The public perception of New Woman authors, represented here by Perugino and Pseudonymia, is based on false and inaccurate information. In Pseudonymia's case, her writing has promoted mistaken beliefs about her identity. The self-representation of Herminia, Allen, and the New Woman novelist in general is portrayed as a literary construct, a fiction that is produced by and limited to literary texts. As a result, the parody undermines the authority and credibility of New Woman authors and figures both New Woman authors and New Woman authorship as deceptive and illegitimate. Pseudonymia's characterization of herself as “misleading in print” is particularly interesting. In addition to implying a gap between her life and her writing, the word “misleading” carries with it the suggestion that New Woman novels misdirect their readers, leading them to false conclusions and the adoption of faulty beliefs. Both the authors and the messages of their texts become aligned with deception, invalidity, and illegitimacy.

Punch's preoccupation with the gendered nature of New Woman authorship is also apparent in an image that appeared alongside the “The Woman Who Wouldn't Do.” Produced by E. T. Reed,¹¹

the image illustrates the last lines of the parody, showing the disillusioned Perugino Allan abandoning Pseudonymia and setting off alone. Stylistically, the image is a visual parody of Aubrey Beardsley's work and his distinctive female figures. As illustrator and designer for the Keynotes series, Beardsley had designed the cover of The Woman Who Did as well as the key design that appeared on the volume's title page, spine, and back cover.

The image emphasizes and explores gender differences existing between Perugino and Pseudonymia. On the one hand, like the text, the image attempts to emphasize Allen's limitations. Reed portrays Perugino as a rather mundane man, dressed in a suit and a bowler hat. He appears as a kind of interloper or trespasser in a highly stylized and exotic landscape; his clothing and his spatial and stylistic relationship to his surrounding scene communicate his alienation from it. The spatial arrangements of the image also communicate Perugino's alienation from Pseudonymia. Positioned in the background, much smaller than Pseudonymia, Perugino is overshadowed and appears insignificant and ineffectual. He is emasculated; a small, utterly ordinary, and insignificant figure, he has no clear role to play in this realm. Reed's image subsequently supplements and affirms the parody's textual representation of Allen as a useless and self-interested participant in the New Woman debate. The illustration also comments on Allen's distance from both his audience and his subject matter. Receding into the distance, with his back turned against Pseudonymia, Perugino is far removed from women, their experiences, and their perspectives. If the image is read as a portrait of the male New Woman novelist, it is clearly not a flattering one.

Pseudonymia, on the other hand, dominates the landscape. She occupies the foreground and is aligned with her surroundings by both her posture and the style in which Reed portrays her. Like many of Beardsley's women, she is an ambiguous representation of femininity, giant, powerful, and potentially malevolent.¹²

As such, Reed's image is an expression of anxieties surrounding the disruptive potential of the New Woman. In contrast to Perugino, her clothing is far from mundane and appears to be inspired by descriptions of the flowing Oriental clothing which Herminia wears in the opening scene of the novel.¹³ She is also highly sexualized. Her hair, her loose clothes, and her languishing posture all contribute to this characterization. Her appearance also aligns her with the larger landscape, a setting that emphasizes her sexuality, with its curved slopes and clouds, and a single dark shrub that functions as a vaginal symbol. Put simply, the image of the two characters emphasizes gender and gendered difference. There is a significant split between the male and female figures in this image; alienated from one another, their characters, perspectives, and objectives are different and apparently incommensurate.

The negative perspectives on New Woman authorship in “The Woman Who Wouldn't Do” also inform minor allusions to Allen and his novel in Punch. One such reference appeared in July of 1895, in a letter published under the title “Misoneogyny.” The majority of the letter is taken up by a poem about the New Woman. It opens with a series of questions:

The allusion to “women who do” identifies the New Woman with Herminia, positing Allen's protagonist as a kind of representative figure for the movement. Having identified the New Woman with her literary equivalent, the speaker concludes that this personage has “no lasting vitality” and that no such woman actually exists: In addition to characterizing “women who do” as monstrous and “unlovely,” the letter suggests that the New Woman is an imaginary textual construct, In other words, the New Woman lacks an equivalent in reality and is produced by and limited to literary texts. By implication, the poem characterizes New Woman novels such as Allen's as inaccurate, deceptive, and disruptive misrepresentations of contemporary society.

A number of cartoons published in 1895 also allude to Allen's novel. Of particular note are a pair of cartoons by George Du Maurier which explore the gendered nature of New Woman authorship. Both cartoons appeared in October of 1895. The first, “Feline Amenities,” draws on traditional characterizations of women as “catty” (Figure 6). It represents two women in conversation, a “Female Friend” and the “fair Author of ‘The Woman Who Durstn't’” (174). In the caption, the visiting lady comments on the fair author's work, saying: “Now you've had such a success, I suppose your publishers will take any rubbish you choose to write” (174). In addition to invoking and belittling recent contributions to the “Woman Who” debate by authors such as Victoria Crosse, the cartoon communicates a number of more general messages about the New Woman novel. To begin with, the cartoon portrays the New Woman novel as a female genre, a genre written by, for, and about women. At the same time, however, the caption complicates this identification by acknowledging the important role of presumably male publishers in this industry. The reference to publishers associates New Woman literature with commercialism and implies that the New Woman novel is a profit-driven enterprise. The visitor's cutting reference to “rubbish” also implies that New Woman literature is of a poor quality. Placing this criticism in the mouth of a woman reader allows the cartoon to suggest a distance among women readers, women novelists and the New Women they portray. As such, the association of the author's work with “rubbish” implies that it is a disingenuous or fraudulent representation of women and society. “Feline Amenities” is thus like the “Misoneogyny” poem in that it represents the New Woman as a fiction, as a literary or discursive construct.

In a second cartoon from later in the same month, Du Maurier returned to the topic of the New Woman novel, portraying a rather masculine woman dressing in front of a mirror (Figure 7). The caption identifies this woman as: “The Latest Literary Success: ‘The Woman Who Wanted To’” (202). The caption clearly evokes Allen's novel, depicting the woman in the cartoon as a kind of ugly sister to Herminia. On one level, the cartoon is a straightforward attack on the New Woman. This attack enlists perceptions of the New Woman as masculine, unattractive, and sexually voracious. The overall effect is to designate the New Woman as abnormal, as desiring, but undesirable. The woman Du Maurier sketches looks, in fact, very much like a man in drag and even bears a slight, but suggestive resemblance to Allen.¹⁴

It is tempting to see the image as a representation of Allen as a transvestite and as a comment on the participation of male authors in the New Woman genre. Both the play on Allen's title and the reference to literary success lend this reading credence. After all, Allen could certainly be characterized as the latest literary success; in October, when the cartoon appeared, his novel was already in its sixteenth edition. If the image is read as a representation of Allen as a transvestite, it is a complex attack on the involvement of male authors in the New Woman genre. Such an attack stigmatizes Allen's involvement in the genre as abnormal and transgressive of gender roles. Dressed up in women's clothes, Allen adopts a female appearance and attempts to pass or masquerade as a woman. The message is a highly conservative one: the involvement of male authors in New Woman literature is a transgression which effeminizes and emasculates them. Of course, if the woman is seen simply as a representation of the New Woman, it is significant that she is identified in the caption with the title of a literary text and that she is described as “The Latest Literary Success.”

This preoccupation is also apparent in an earlier article that experiments with gender reversal and misidentification in more direct ways. The article, entitled “The New Man: A Fragment from the Romance of the Near Future,” was published in October 1894, several months before the publication of Allen's novel. In it, Punch comments on the New Woman phenomenon by reversing stereotypical gender roles and placing men in the conventional position of women. The main character of the piece is, for example, a devoted but beleaguered male homemaker who waits up late for his drunken, carousing wife to return home from the Club. Significantly, his characterization includes references to “Bobby,” a “New Man” novel, which promotes radical alternatives to the dissatisfactions of a homebound life. Waiting for his wife, the man reads about the eponymous protagonist who breaks with convention, attending the theater without a chaperone and doing other progressive things. The homemaker is shocked and asks: “How can men write of men like this? I am not surprised that women think badly of us when we thus paint ourselves” (167). When his insensitive wife finally arrives home, he puts the New Man novel aside in order to attend to her. As part of a larger reversal of gender roles that takes place in this piece, the New Woman novelist and the New Woman protagonist are replaced with a New Man novelist and New Man protagonist. Similarly, a male reader replaces a female reader. Despite these reversals, novel reading and novel writing are gendered feminine. The gender switch produces humor, but it does not disrupt or reconfigure gender relations or hierarchies; instead, it temporarily reverses them. Indeed, by replacing the New Woman novel, author, and reader with a New Man equivalent of the same, Punch characterizes any significant reversal in gender roles or relations as laughable. The piece also manages to present a disjunction between social reality and the vision presented by New Woman literature. Bobby is clearly characterized by the male reader as an imaginary figure, a being who exists only in literature.

A one-line joke from November 1894 shows a similarly conservative interest in the New Man and the potential subversiveness of this role. It reads simply: “THE NEW MAN.–Woman” (249). The equation works in two possible directions. On the one hand, it infers that the changing position and behavior of some women identifies them as the “new” men. On the other hand, the equation implies that men who are sympathetic to the New Woman cause and who have reformed their behavior are emasculated as a consequence. Either way, the message speaks to the existence of considerable anxieties about the possible blurring of gender roles.

Punch's reception of Allen's novel had much in common with the wider critical response. Like other critics, Punch comments on the style of the novel, the gap between Allen's theory and his practice, and the conflation of Allen and his protagonists. But, Punch's response to the novel extends beyond these concerns to embrace a series of more stringent views on the New Woman novel and the New Woman novel author. These include the characterization of the New Woman as a deceptive fiction and the alignment of male New Woman authorship with the transgressions of transvestitism. Perhaps Punch's reformulations of Allen's original title give the clearest and most immediate indication of the deep-seated conservatism of these views. In the parody, Punch rewrote The Woman Who Did as “The Woman Who Wouldn't Do,” replacing the fact of accomplishment with suggestions of inadequacy and failure. In the poem from “Misoneogyny,” the representational validity of The Woman Who Did comes under fire as the speaker changes the verb in the title to the present tense in order to ask, “Where are the ‘Women Who Do’?” (35). A final reworking of the title for the cartoon, “The Woman Who Wanted To,” emphasizes ineffectuality and unfulfilled desire. Regardless of the specific details, the intended effect is the same: Punch mocks Allen's novel, discrediting the New Woman and her New Man literary proponents and combating the threat which they were thought to present.

After The Woman Who Did: The Type-Writer Girl and Rosalba

THE FINAL YEARS OF ALLEN'S LIFE AND career make for an enlightening postscript to the evolution of both his and his readers' attitudes toward male authorship in the New Woman book market. After The Woman Who Did, he continued to write New Woman fiction, namely The Type-Writer Girl (1897), Rosalba (1899), Miss Cayley's Adventures (1899), and Hilda Wade (1899). The latter two novels, first serialized in The Strand, introduce unconventional female detectives as the protagonists but disclose a conservative agenda as women finally marry and end their careers. Allen's other two novels are more interesting for what they reveal about his evolving relationship to the New Woman novel. Both The Type-Writer Girl and Rosalba use first-person narratives and feature New Woman protagonists. The Type-Writer Girl focuses on Juliet Appleton, an archetypal New Woman who is economically self-sufficient, a bike-rider, and a would-be anarchist. Significantly, she is also an author; a chapter entitled “I Try Literature” describes the creation and publication of her “little literary first-born” (172; ch. 16), “a short story of the modern girl who earns her own living in London” (171). The protagonist also voices a critical perspective on male novelists and their failure to depict women accurately, suggesting a fundamental conflict between male and female authors:

Rosalba: The Story of her Development is also narrated in the first person and describes the life story of its eponymous heroine, a woman who is both a New Woman and a fledgling author. She entitles her first story “Cecca's First Lover” and sends her first novel “in fear and trembling” (308; ch. 21) to a young publisher who publishes it under a “prudent pseudonym” (309). As The Type-Writer Girl and Rosalba demonstrate, Allen maintained his interest in New Woman authorship even in the wake of scandal over The Woman Who Did.

Even more importantly, however, these novels demonstrate Allen's continued engagement with the question of his own authorial identity in the New Woman book market. Allen published these two novels under a female pseudonym–Olive Pratt Rayner. In The Type-Writer Girl, he even included a dedication to lend credence to the existence of a woman named Rayner: “To Theodore Rayner and Oliver Wendell Pratt, A Wife's Homage, A Sister's Love” (6). Allen's adoption of a female pseudonym to produce these two novels is the logical outcome of the kinds of complex and shifting configurations of gender that characterize both his own construction of authorial identity and the critical reception of The Woman Who Did. Christopher Keep, discussing The Type-Writer Girl, argues that Allen's use of a pseudonym and first-person female narrator is a “duplicitous” way to appropriate women's perspective in order “to subvert effectively the gender radicalism of his character from within” (415). Keep's concept of Allen's “ventriloquism” could describe Allen's authorial role in both The Type-Writer Girl and Rosalba, but Allen's use of a woman's authorial identity and voice does not seem as successful or confident as Keep suggests.¹⁵

Instead, his pseudonym suggests the complexities surrounding male authorship. As William Prideaux Courtney argues, Allen adopted pseudonyms either through “fear” or “concealment” (106). When he embarked on fiction, he used the names J. Arbuthnot and Cecil Power to protect his reputation as a man of science. Once he established himself as a man of letters, he adopted other pseudonyms to conceal his incursion into doubtful fictional genres. Allen adopts the name Rayner, his only female pseudonym, probably not to deceive his readers but to conceal his identity. It does enable him to bypass the kinds of challenges created by his participation as a male author in a female genre, but Allen also seems uncomfortable with his disguise. Even as he reconfigures himself with a pseudonym reminiscent of Olive Schreiner, he inserts references to works written under his real name. Rosalba's first story “Cecca's First Lover” recalls Allen's 1894 story that shares a similar title, “Cecca's Lover.” Rosalba's experiences with a publisher, moreover, echo Herminia's in The Woman Who Did: both women send off their manuscripts “in fear and trembling” (96; ch. 13 and 308; ch. 21). By adopting a female identity in order to produce New Woman novels and to criticize the limited perspectives of male novelists, Allen concludes with the surreptitious reconfiguration of his own gender. The occasional slippage of this authorial disguise, however, suggests his discomfort in wearing it.

The Type-Writer Girl and Rosalba did not excite the same response as The Woman Who Did. For both novels, there were only a handful of reviews, and reviewers seemed unaware that Allen was the author. The Times, for example, spoke of the female author's “inexperience” (11). The Athenaeum, the only major periodical to review the books, also accepted the fiction of the female author. Its reviews were particularly anxious to establish the underlying virtue of the unorthodox New Woman characters: one review insists that The Type-Writer Girl is “wholesome in tone” (348), while another finds that Rosalba shows “the real generosity and womanliness that underlie the mutinous spirit of this merry, rather vulgar maid” (93). Allen's authorship was not discovered until after his death in 1899. On October 28th, approximately one week after his death, the Athenaeum published his obituary and revealed his pseudonym (589). While it is unclear whether this information circulated before his death, it is clear that it had no significant impact. Neither eulogy, biography, or press commented on his appropriation of a female pen-name, nor did the sale of his female signature novels increase to suggest awakened public interest.¹⁶

Because of the intense scrutiny over his participation in the New Woman book market, it seems surprising that no one focused on his most sly and significant gender incursion of all. It could be that Allen was out of vogue by 1899, or male participation in the New Woman genre was no longer controversial, or the New Woman had lost her cultural allure. Whatever the reason for this indifference toward Allen's appropriation of a female pen-name, the evolution of his male authorial identity as a New Woman writer in this period of “sexual anarchy” finally realizes Punch's proleptic parody of the author in drag, an uncomfortable and awkward “Woman Who Wanted To.”