Ella Hepworth Dixon?s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women?s weekly The Lady?s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself, the novel?s heroine Mary Erle is a woman writer struggling to make her living as a journalist in the 1880s. Forced by her father?s sudden death to support herself, Mary Erle turns to writing three-penny-a-line fiction, works that (as her editor insists) must have a ball in the first volume, a picnic and a parting in the second, and an opportune death in the third.This Broadview edition?s rich selection of historical documents helps contextualize The Story of a Modern Woman in relation to contemporary debates about the ?New Woman.?