Like the sensation novelists, the New Woman writers were accused of knowing and, more importantly, articulating ‘much that ladies are not accustomed to know’ (James 1865:593), especially about sex and the pathology of sexual disease. Arthur Waugh (1894) was not alone in holding ‘women-writers …chiefly to blame’ for ‘the latest development of literary frankness’, which ‘in fiction…infects its heroines with acquired diseases of names unmentionable’ (217-18). In their overt and explicit treatment of the double standard and the pathology of sexual disease, the New Woman writers were involved in a reworking of those discourses on prostitution and female sexuality within which the sensation novelists wrote.

The sensation novel, as I suggested earlier, was produced within a polarised discourse in which female sexuality was represented as either non-existent or all-pervading. The family was figured as the protector of a feminine purity which was itself (contradictorily) threatened by an invading female sexuality—that of the prostitute or fallen woman, who was seen as the bearer of corruption and disease. In contrast, the New Woman writers figured men as both the physical and moral corrupters of the family. The sexually threatening woman, the femme fatale successor of the murderous women of sensation fiction, remained a potent cultural image in the works of fin de siècle male writers and artists. By the 1890s, however, the deadly syphilitic male ‘had become an arch-villain of feminist protest fiction, a carrier of contamination and madness, and a threat to the spiritual evolution of the human race’ (Showalter 1986a:88).

In her representations of the diseased male, Sarah Grand,

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