Anna Lombard
Anna Lombard is a New Woman novel by Annie Sophie Cory writing as Victoria Cross. First published in 1901, it is based on the idea that it takes a New Man as well to form a perfect union of the sexes.
Literary significance and criticism
In the
charity, and self-sacrifice that our Redeemer himself enjoined. [...] Fearlessly, and with the Gospel
of Christ in my hand, I offer this example of his teaching to the great Christian public for its verdict, confident that I shall be justified by it."
Anna Lombard ultimately sold more than six million copies and went through more than 40 editions. It received favourable (
transgressional fiction violating law—advocating or at least justifying infanticide—, convention, and contemporary sensibility by constructing an image of British female sexuality that had rarely been conceived in any detail outside of pornographic
texts, for example the notion that a sexually experienced woman is an asset to a marriage.
As such a sensation novel, Anna Lombard is mentioned in Katherine Mansfield's 1908 short story, "The Tiredness of Rosabel," [1] where a young working-class woman reading a "cheap, paper-covered edition" on the bus is completely absorbed in the book.
References
- Melisa Brittain: "Dangerous Crossings: Victorian Feminism, Imperialist Discourse, and Victoria Cross's 'New Woman' in Indigenous Space", M.A. thesis (University of Guelph, 1999), particularly Chapter 3: "The 'Fall' and 'Rise' of the Transgressive New Woman: Representing the Unrepresentable in Anna Lombard".
- William L. Alden: "London Literary Letter", The New York Times (June 1, 1901) BR15. (Comparing the novel to Zola's La Terre, Alden calls Anna Lombard "a nauseating book [...] which no man should read immediately before dinner unless he wishes to lose his appetite.")
- W .T. Stead: "Anna Lombard: A Novel of the Ethics of Sex", Review of ReviewsNo. 23 (1901) 595–597.
External links
- Anna Lombard online at the Internet Archive
- A recent blog about Anna Lombard discussing plot, author and context.