It was impossible that the demands of women for freedom should become a feature of modern life without the marriage relation, as at present understood, being called into question.

(Caird 1897:67)

The Woman Question is the Marriage Question.

(Grand 1894:276)

Although sometimes more experimental in form, and almost always more didactic and overtly polemical than the sensationalists, the New Woman writers shared many of their predecessors’ preoccupations. Chief among these was a common concern with women’s marital and familial roles. Like Braddon and Wood, the New Woman writers of the 1890s focused minutely on the domestic space and, whether writing as feminists or as anti-feminists, engaged in a probing exploration and critique of marriage and the family. ‘In almost every case’, wrote W.T. Stead in 1894, ‘the novels of the modern woman are preoccupied with questions of sex, questions of marriage, questions of maternity’ (65). Even those writers who sought to affirm the ‘naturalness’ of marriage and motherhood (as Mrs Henry Wood had in the 1860s) could only do so within the terms of the renewed contest over those institutions in the 1890s.

Nineteenth-century definitions of femininity and of female sexuality were inextricably linked to contemporary definitions of marriage and to the social and political functions it served.

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