1. As Amy Robinson perceptively argues in her contribution to this collection, Oliphant’s most provocative lines have often been cited out of context. Her criticism of limiting plotlines was by no means a reaction simply to late-Victorian explicit references to issues of sex and gender, as has often been implied. The dismissal of “a family resemblance” among replications of “the old, old story, how Edwin and Angelina fell in love with each other” (555) in an 1855 article already anticipated her later explosion of the confines of the “Sex Problem” as a plotline. D. J. Trela has importantly reassessed what were “[p]ossibly the words most harmful to her current reputation”: Oliphant’s late essay “The Anti-Marriage League” (1896), in which “she lacerated Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and showed herself (so received opinion goes) prudish, squeamish about honest representations of sex, and a middling talent unable to recognise great writing” (13). Trela shows that the issue was much more complicated: Oliphant “did find [Hardy’s] sexual honesty repellent because she felt the foregrounding of sex a contrivance, a distortion of the way she believed most people really lived and acted” (13).

2. Critically engaging with changing definitions, Sanders also stresses the implications of their anachronistic application: feminist was not officially used until 1894; antifeminist was first coined in the preface to Shaw’s Saint Joan (1924). See Sanders (Eve’s 2).

3. These New Woman novels may therefore seem “defeatist” in contrast to the self-representations of “womanly” writers such as Gaskell or Oliphant, who “repeatedly represent themselves as reconciling the conflicts between their writing and their feminine, domestic vocations with cheerfulness and equanimity” (Pykett 143). In a study of female artistic labour that focuses on the empowering functions of domesticity for women entering in the workplace, beyond the traditional concept of separate spheres, Patricia Zakreski reassesses traditional evaluations of work, domesticity, and domestic art, suggesting a careful differentiation that hinges upon motivation as much as upon actual output: women who maintain the domestic through their work become posed against those seeking to escape its confines (123). June Sturrock similarly suggests that it is antifeminist writers who “deal directly and repeatedly with women as successful, paid, and published writers, rather than displacing questions of women’s creativity on to public performers, as George Eliot does with her great women singers, Armgart or Al Charisi, or as Charlotte Brontë does with her impassioned Rachel-figure, Vashti” (122).