When John Tempest, the eponymous heroine's future husband in Mary Cholmondeley's first successful novel, Diana Tempest (1893), discloses his intention to announce his newly acquired knowledge of his illegitimacy and thereby reject his name, position and estate, he is accused of committing ‘social suicide’. This phrase becomes repeated, in variations that generate an encompassing refrain, as marriage, social position and death are continuously interlinked. If an unhappy union is a ‘voluntary death in life, from which there is no resurrection’, chosen by women who speculate on the marriage market with their eyes open, it constitutes the reverse, or mirror, version of the social self-effacement the false heir claims as his new, alternative, self-definition. Such a renunciation of an identity defined by society ultimately functions as a counterpoise to this killing off of the self in the marriage market. Throughout the novel, the suicidal operates as a structural metaphor to explore the confines of social identities and their construction based on money and, increasingly, money alone. While this critique of a commercial, speculative, society renders traditional landed values desirable after all – marking them out as a panacea even – such incipient nostalgia is ruptured by a break in the line of Tempests. It literalizes formal breakages that denote the novel's reuse of already outmoded sensational formulae as epistemologically self-reflexive. A seemingly climactic literalization of metaphors of the suicidal therein completes a partly parodic play with suicide's sensational potential. The legacies of a literary sensationalism that had notoriously begun to saturate the book market from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, I shall show, structure Diana Tempest in intriguing twists that map out new directions for fin-de-siècle literature.

Far from operating merely as transitional works, Cholmondeley's early writings encapsulate important shifts in the development of the novel genre at the end of the century. In Diana Tempest, a reworking of established courtship and inheritance plots, a critique of the marriage market and an aborted narrative of sensational mystery and detection that pivots on an elusive murder plot all combine to question subjectivity defined or constricted by society.