First serialized in Temple Bar in 1880, Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Rebel of the Family has enjoyed renewed interest in the 21st century due to the efforts of feminist critics who have focused on the novel’s several controversial issues. While Linton gained a reputation as an anti-feminist, her fiction portrays a sympathetic view of what her era called “the New Woman,” an individual interested in intellectual and sexual freedoms not previously experienced by females, and likely to dye her hair, don outrageous fashions, and behave in a “vulgar” manner.

Linton’s contemporaries wondered in print in various reviews of the book whether the author intended her sympathetic voice to be taken as ironic, or whether her somewhat autobiographical protagonist, Perdita Winstanley, is meant to gain the admiration of readers.

Perdita remains out of step with the rigid cadences of her highly patriarchal society. She espouses social equity, work for women, and freedom to choose a marriage partner free from economic restraints. Linton peppers her novel with additional, related controversial themes, including lesbianism and the importance of an intellectual life for young females.

As the lone plain, bookish democrat in a family of beautiful, vacuous, genteelly impoverished aristocrats, Perdita finds herself at odds with her sisters due to her rebellious behavior. Thomasina is described as having a “style and a perfect smile,” while “Eva’s blush-rose face took the heart out of men and made the wise like unto fools.” The narrator adds, “So it has been ever since the sons of God lost their heaven for woman’s eyes; and so it will be till the end of time—or the beginning of the Emancipated Woman’s supremacy.”

Perdita aspires to be that emancipated woman, embarrassing her mother and sisters by professing “extraordinary opinions,” thereby “spoiling” her sisters’ chances of a harmonious social life. Linton plays on stereotypical representations of women and society’s double message regarding an attractive female, who was given the unenviable assignment of remaining simultaneously desirable to men while chaste and pure. Otherwise, she was in danger of becoming a wicked seductress.

The narrator says of the lovely Eva (obviously a version of the name Eve), “she had the power of a veritable witch,” and describes Eva as exhibiting “harmless little sensualities,” such as the manner by which her “red ripe lips closed over bonbons, and the white sharp little teeth buried themselves in the fleshy pulp of fruit,” actions reflecting “the naive innocence of evil.”

As “unconventional” in her dress as in her opinions, Perdita calls attention to herself by proclaiming that middle-class women be permitted to work. She accepts the position in the Post Office Savings Bank offered to her through the influence of Thomasina’s suitor to act on her ideology. When she befriends, and later becomes romantically involved with, a druggist, she engages in the social mixing her sisters decry, and most dismays them by taking part in the West Hill Society for Women’s Rights.

There she forms a questionable relationship with the organization’s president, Bell Blount. While Perdita will eventually denounce feminists as hypocrites and conform through marriage to Leslie Crawford, freeing her sisters to also form solid matches, her experiences make problematic her abrupt reversal of feelings. While Bell is at last revealed to be, in critic Deborah Meem’s words, “a vampire on the prowl,” Linton has also made clear the character’s magnetic personality, revealing Linton’s own awareness of a type of lesbian culture that in her own age grew along with increasing opportunities for women.

Like George Eliot, Elizabeth Linton wrote of subjects said to cause readers “repulsion,” gaining her the criticism of contemporaries like Charles Dickens. However, her effect on the writing community materialized in later fiction, including Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886). While James could as a male writer deal with themes such as lesbianism and not fall victim to charges of moral turpitude, a female writer could not.

The Rebel of the Family adds to the development of a narrative persona on Linton’s part that continues to fascinate those who wonder whether it resembled the “real” Elizabeth Linton, or simply promoted robust sale of her fiction.

Bibliography
Meem, Deborah T. Introduction to The Rebel of the Family, by Elizabeth Linton. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, Ltd., 2002, 9–16.