Patricia Murphy
Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 57-79
This essay examines Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina (1897), exploring this anti-New Woman novelist’s demonization of her feminist character, Faustina. Though she was widely read in her own day, Broughton has not received much critical attention, yet Dear Faustina provides a fascinating glimpse of the discourses marshalled in the century’s final decades to decry feminist social agenda; it incorporates the vituperative sentiments that entered cultural discourse through both fictional and nonfictional writings and resonates with the nascent scientific study of female homoeroticism conducted by such Victorian sexologists as Havelock Ellis. The essay argues that while this novel rejects the New Woman’s gender relations, her social projects are normalized by being relocated to a male-dominated environment. Even after Faustina’s defeat, Broughton retains a commitment to a social mission for women despite the novel’s return to patriarchal norms.
