Rhoda Broughton's Dear Faustina (1897) has been consistently interpreted as a novel that engages with, and on occasion mocks, late nineteenth-century characterisations of the independent urban working woman. The familiar narrative commences with Althea Vane’s decision to relinquish the material comforts of her upper-class home and, with the guidance and encouragement of New Woman figure Faustina Bateson, embrace socially progressive causes while cohabiting with her in a ‘Chelsea flat’. As Althea becomes disillusioned by Faustina's political and personal infidelity, however, she exchanges her commitment to the symbolic ‘higher claims’ (40) touted by Faustina for settlement work and a relationship with a man of her own social status. While nineteenth-century critics identified the novel as a ‘satire’ of women's charitable work, modern examinations have focused on the ways in which the novel is preoccupied with recasting the independent woman's homosocial household with the more socially acceptable configuration of heteronormative domesticity. Lisa Hagar convincingly reads the novel's narrative of ‘inversion’ as one that is linked to the themes of social work explored by the text, and suggests that the ‘cross-class relationship’ is one that ‘imagines lesbian desire in terms of philanthropic desire’. Yet Dear Faustina exceeds a narrative of inversion and instead complicates models of opposition, specifically those related to gender, sexuality and class. In its representation of two key forms of housing, women's residences and settlement housing, Dear Faustina explores the way that these new domestic forms made legible the nuanced and inextricable relationship between economic and sexual power.

Dear Faustina draws on both the traditional and modern meaning of the word ‘economic’. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did the word develop its associations with the ‘science of economics’ or ‘political economy’ that today carry its principal weight in meaning. Before this time, the word was more closely associated with its Greek root oikonomia, which refers to the management of a household or a family. The text makes significant use of this ambivalent meaning, as it denotes the intimate relationship between the household – and the relationships that define it – and material wealth.