Mary Gladstone: Late-Victorian Hostess, Salonnière —and New Woman

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Mary Gladstone's identity as an accomplished musician, salonnière , hostess, and ministerial secretary has been well-documented in recent scholarship. So has her close alliance with her father W. E. Gladstone, including their shared commitment to Victorian liberalism, Anglicanism, and the sanctity of the domestic sphere. But her close friendships with heterodox thinkers, her writings, and her work in support of female suffrage and social purity feminism suggest important distinctions between her views and those of her father. They also demonstrate that she occupied another subject position in late-century Britain: that of a proto-New Woman. Viewing her within this discursive field, and analyzing her associations with thinkers like Henry Scott Holland, Josephine Butler, John Jay Chapman, and Olive Schreiner, illuminate important, overlooked aspects of her life and ideological sympathies. Examining her diary entries, publications, and correspondence—especially her exchanges with Chapman and Schreiner—sheds new light on Gladstone's involvement in the socio-political, religious, and gender debates of the fin de siècle and of the distinctly progressive forms of her social and political liberalism.