The Rebel of the Family

Book excerpt: The Rebel of the Family (1880) is the first New Woman novel by Eliza Lynn Linton. Perdita Winstanley, the novel's protagonist, struggles to balance the competing demands of her snobbish, conservative mother and sisters, her radical friends in the women's rights movement, and an admirable but low-born chemist and his family. The Rebel of the Family also includes what is perhaps the first literary portrait of the late-Victorian lesbian community in London, featuring Bell Blount and her “little wife” Connie. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and appendices that help to set the work in its historical and literary contexts.