Introduction

When Sara Jeannette Duncan set out in A Daughter of Today to write a study of a female egoist, she had no real models in the heroines of Victorian fiction. While Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke may have longed for personal and romantic fulfilment, neither was sullied with the sin of complete self-absorption. Though the New Woman in 1890s fiction may have expressed discontent with the institution of marriage and with sexual double standards (shocking enough attitudes in themselves to many contemporary readers), few things transgressed the Victorian cult of femininity as surely as the depiction of a female egoist. Even feminists of the day justified their emancipation and education in terms of service and self-sacrifice, as they envisaged a healthier and more informed group of child bearers, taking the race to new heights. For example, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy wrote in 1894:

Becoming better mothers was also one of Mona Caird's arguments for the education of women, in her 1892 article, ‘A Defence of the So-Called “Wild Women”’.