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Subverting the Ideal: The New Woman and the Battle of the Sexes in the Short Fiction of Ella D'Arcy

In 1895, Mrs. Devereux, a writer for the Saturday Review, claimed that "Life has taken on a strange unloveliness, and the least beautiful thing therein is the New Woman" (824). Much of the fiction of the 1890s reflected and contributed to the debate prompted by the emergence of the "New Woman," a debate which arose out of the social concern of men and women writers for the female experience in a patriarchal society. The resulting New woman school of writing tried to do two things: first, to argue the moral and social case for a higher degree of emancipation for women; and second, to show how firmly entrenched in tradition were the conventions which oppressed women at the turn of the century. Constance Eleanor Mary Byrne D'Arcy is one such writer. D'Arcy, as one of the most influential writers in John Lane's Keynotes series and a frequent contributor to the Yellow Book, was often compared to authors such as "George Egerton," Henry James and Guy de Maupassant who were at the forefront of the experimental short fiction of the late nineteenth century. The daughter of Irish parents, D'Arcy was born in either 1856 or 1857 in London, and was educated as an artist at the Slade School in London, as well as studying in France, Germany, and the Channel Islands. D'Arcy's poor eyesight forced her to abandon a career as a painter and to turn to writing. A lack of autobiographical accounts about her life and literary career may have been intentional as she was reticent about her personal circumstances. Gossip had it that she had several well-known liaisons with men such as Henry Harland, John Lane, and M.P. Shiel, but it is apparent that she had little real interest in a conventional relationship. D'Arcy was the assistant editor of the notorious Yellow Book in which she found her first literary success with the publication of