Ella and Marion Hepworth Dixon: ‘What’s in a Name?’

Abstract

‘The name, of course, [...] the name counts for something. Your late father’s name carries weight with a certain section of the public’, declares a fictional editor in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s seminal New Woman novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894).[i] One cannot help wondering if the name ‘Hepworth Dixon’ resonated in the same way for Henry Harland and John Lane, the editors of The Yellow Book, which began that same year. The name had definitely acquired a certain notoriety earlier in the century when William Hepworth Dixon (1821-1879) had been editor of The Athenæum from 1853 to 1869, but by 1894 two of his daughters, Marion (1856-1936) and her younger sister, Ella (1857-1932), had begun to make names for themselves in the literary world.

[i] Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (Broadview, 2004), p. 108. Italics in original. Initially serialised in twelve weekly instalments in the Lady’s Pictorial between January and March 1894, then published in book form later that year by Heinemann in London and Cassell in New York, the novel has since been republished several times, first in 1990 in the Merlin Radical Fiction series. All subsequent page references will refer to the Broadview edition.