By the early 1870s., the sort of girl suggested by Robertson's Cecilia Dunscombe had roused flurries of dismay. As defined by Elizabeth Lynn Linton in a series of unsigned articles for the Saturday Review (1868), ‘The Girl of the Period’ personified the fallen standards of an acquisitive, pleasure-mad society and challenged the feminine ideal, ‘neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival, … a tender mother, an industrious housekeeper, a judicious mistress’. Mrs Linton spoke for all women ‘of home birth and breeding’ when she castigated the modern type who cared little for maidenly duty, indulged in ‘slang, bold talk, and fastness’, pursued money instead of love and happiness and, when she married, was bored by her domestic confines: ‘Love in a cottage, that seductive dream … is now a myth of past ages.’