The Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays, Vol. 2 (of 2)

E. Lynn Linton enters the arena like a Victorian gladiator, skewering the absurdities of her age with a pen dipped in vitriol and wit. This second volume collects her most notorious social essays, including the incendiary title piece that made her name and enemies in equal measure. Linton turns her gaze on the 'gushing man' - that specimen of emotional incontinence who repels her precise, controlled sensibility - and on 'Sweet Seventeen', those young women teetering between childhood and the crushing expectations of womanhood. But it is her attack on the 'Girl of the Period' - the forward, opinionated, 'new woman' of the 1880s - that sparks the real fire. Linton detested female pretension with a passion that leaps off the page, and her critics called her a traitor to her sex while others falsely claimed authorship of her sharpest barbs. Read these essays not as historical curiosity but as a window into the culture wars of the late nineteenth century - the same battles, dressed in different clothes, we still fight today.