The Woman Who Did

It certainly created an immediate popular sensation - Flora Thompson for instance describing how, in small-town Hampshire, "copies were bought and handed round until practically everyone of mature age in the village had read and passed judgement on it".

[2] Whereas Herminia Barton questions the institution of marriage by refusing to get married herself, Victoria Crosse's heroine Eurydice Williamson—"the woman who didn't"—remains faithful to her impossible husband although, during a passage from India, she meets a man who falls in love with her.

The author said of this: "If one young girl is kept from a loveless, mistaken marriage, if one frivolous nature is checked in her career of flirtation by remembrance of Lady Morris, I shall perhaps be forgiven by the public for raising my feeble voice in answer to The Woman Who Did".

[4] Sarah Grand, the feminist writer who coined the term "New Woman," considered the novel to have and important social purity moral:Mr. Grant Allen is a large-minded, liberal man, and he argues that if men are permitted to practice polygamy then women should be equally free to indulge in polyandry.

The story answers the question when followed to its logical conclusions, and shows very clearly that women have nothing to gain and everything to lose by renouncing the protection which legal marriage gives.