Abstract/Summary

In the present article we argue that British middlebrow literature often adheres to conservative plot structures aimed at a generic market, and that its impact in socio-cultural terms requires and rewards scrutiny. As Jane Eldridge Miller observes, “it was not easy for [Edwardian] New Woman novelists to change the signification of strongly rooted conventions which associated marriage with feminine success and the suffering or death of the heroine with some kind of moral retribution”, avoiding the trap of narrative containment. We will examine the subversive potential within such containment, with suicide, one of its classical forms, as an example. To this purpose, we will use Victoria Cross’s novel Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903) to illustrate a distinctively middlebrow way of contesting constructions of gender and sexuality.