‘[S]uch a nasty, sneering book’: Class, Gender, and Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler’s Concerning Isabel Carnaby

The status of women in public life was brought spectacularly to the forefront of public consciousness by the New Woman debate of 1894. This media-feeding frenzy identified and made visible a literary sub-genre, focusing readers’ attention on writing by and about women in new and increasingly politicised ways. Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler’s Concerning Isabel Carnaby explores the difficulties of an upper-class woman author in managing the expectations of her social circle, while navigating a professional network based largely in the class below. Viewing gender through a class lens in this way reveals the dilemma for writers such as Fowler, whose social identity precludes the overt engagement with a wider audience that is inseparable from successful authorship. The novel’s deliberate glossing of the mechanics of publication sends out a particular message about the woman author and her cultural currency. But the fictional author of the anonymously published Shams and Shadows is doubly punished for having betrayed the secrets of her set. Not only is the book denounced by more discerning readers—her saintly lover nearly wrecks his own career, when rumours circulate that he is the author, and he exacts her promise not to contradict them.