Now that woman is conscious of her own individuality as a woman, she needs an artistic mode of expression, she flings aside the old forms, and seeks for new.

(Hansson 1896:78-9)

[T]he language is seldom choice; and the manner is self-conscious, or even pedantic …[D]eclamation, argument, caricature, interminable prosing of everyone to his neighbour, and absolute farce, make amends for the absence of genuine humour, of wit and comedy, of refinement and ease in the dialogue.

(Barry 1894:295, on The Heavenly Twins)

Late nineteenth-century reviewers and many late twentieth-century feminist literary historians have concurred in finding the New Woman writing aesthetically flawed. It is said to buckle under the weight of its feminist rhetoric, its ‘ethical propagandism’ and ‘abstract intellectualism’ (Williams 1925:436). It is accused of lapsing into formal conventionalism and ideological conformity, or alternatively of collapsing inwardly into aesthetic dead ends, or the dead end of aestheticism. Elaine Showalter has found the New Woman writers and their successors guilty of both of these apparently contradictory failings. Turn-of-the-century women writers, she has argued, were trapped in the aesthetic dead end of a conservative ideology.

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