Mona Maclean, Adaptably Amorous

Abstract

This article investigates how Margaret Georgina Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student [1892], is largely unapologetic in its presentation of queer female characters. In a quasi-autobiographical product of a Sapphic woman, Todd’s eponymous heroine functions as a fictionalised version of Todd herself. Mona Maclean’s remarkable queerness reveals itself when we subject the text and the relationships therein to what Sharon Marcus refers to as ‘just reading’ in her monograph Between Women. Female amity in Todd’s novel exists within a broad spectrum of desire, from friendly flirtation to what I term ‘New Coupledom’, a queer, coupled complement to New Womanhood for women who use heterosexual marriages to facilitate their same-sex partnerships. This article aims to make the logical next step from examining the force of the New Woman novel to the purchase of a principally queer New Woman novel in the late nineteenth century.