Women’s Quest for Independence in the 1890s: Mary Cholmondeley’s Diana Tempest and Red Pottage

Walker discusses how Mary Cholmondeley addresses the Woman Question in her novels Diana Tempest (1893) and Red Pottage (1899), drawing on Mona essay ‘Marriage’ to demonstrate how Cholmondeley’s strong heroines display many traits associated with the New Woman. Like Caird, Cholmondeley challenges ideas about marriage in the 1890s, in her forward-thinking views about women’s place in society. Her characters, Diana Tempest, Rachel West, and Hester Gresley, demonstrate the various ways in which women searched for fulfilment in a society bound by convention and illustrate the importance of economic and emotional independence for women. Cholmondeley cleverly contrasts close female friendships with brother/sister relationships in these novels to expose the social inequalities faced by women; she demonstrates women’s desire for a voice in society by subtly inserting the argument for women’s rights into her work and questioning the inheritance law of primogeniture. Although Cholmondeley herself denied that she was in favour of female suffrage, Walker argues that because her heroines successfully challenge society’s accepted norms, they were likely to instil a sense of unease within conservative readers of the 1890s.