My Flirtations

Many novels, most notably Hannah Webster's The Coquette, focused on how terrible it is for a woman to flirt before her marriage. "I did not speak 20 sentences before sir Robert proposed to me", explained Lady Bidulph while teaching her daughter how to court properly in "Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph". A coquette must be a fool, wicked, and immoral. But Peggy is none of these. She sees things as they are, sometimes too much for her own good, and flirts with men she finds interesting. She decides to tell about them, from her point of view. The feelings, the reasons they did not keep in touch, and her "notions" about them. This is her way to examine late Victorian society including the lives of other oppressed minorities. This novel is considered semi autobiographical.

By : Ella Hepworth Dixon

01 - Chapter 1 02 - Chapter 2 03 - Chapter 3 04 - Chapter 4 05 - Chapter 5 06 - Chapter 6 07 - Chapter 7 08 - Chapter 8 09 - Chapter 9 10 - Chapter 10 11 - Chapter 11 12 - Chapter 12 13 - Chapter 13

Ella Hepworth Dixon was an English author and editor. Her best-known work is the New Woman novel The Story of a Modern Woman, which has been reprinted in the 21st century.

Ella Hepworth Dixon was born on 27 March 1857 at Essex Villa, Queens Road, Marylebone, London. She was the seventh child in a family of eight born to the Manchester-born William Hepworth Dixon (1821–1879) and Marian MacMahon Dixon, who came from Ireland. William was an editor, and literature and the arts were valued in their house for boys and for girls. His position also brought a circle of writers and thinkers to the house, including Geraldine Jewsbury, T. H. Huxley, Richard Francis Burton, Lord Bulwer Lytton, Sir John Everett Millais, and E. M. Ward.

Dixon received an outstanding education for a young woman at her time, studying briefly at Heidelberg. She and her sister Marion trained at the Academie Julianne and they exhibited their work in the UK before their father died in 1879. Money was tight and she took to writing exploiting her family's connections.