Le roman est peuplé de mères de substitution et de filles spirituelles, présentées favorablement et parfois idéalisées. Bien que Christopher revendique dans les dernières pages du roman une indépendance et une solitude absolues, le personnage a en réalité été construit dans sa relation aux autres. Dans ses romans, on trouve à la fois des caricatures accusées de féministes et des femmes rebelles aux traits plus nuancés. En tant que première femme journaliste professionnelle, Linton critiqua les femmes émancipées. La vie d’Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-1898), femme de lettres antiféministe, fut pleine de contradictions.

Linton’s radical adoption of a male persona creates situations in which the binary divisions s/he endorses as a journalist no longer hold true. My analysis will explore Linton’s piece of self-writing from the angle of feminist narratology. The sex reversals in the characters, some of whom may have been partly modelled upon Linton herself, allow her to construct herself as male, to exploit the Bildungsroman plot and to subvert traditionally gendered romance. Although Christopher claims in the last pages that he “stand absolutely alone”, the character has been constructed throughout the narrative mainly in inter-relational terms, and the story is peopled with positive, partly idealized, spiritual and intellectual godmothers and daughters. As a novelist, she drew damning caricatures of women rights supporters, while some of her rebellious women are depicted in a positive, albeit ambiguous, light. As the first professional woman journalist in Britain, Linton castigated the emancipated woman. The life of the famous anti-feminist Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-1898) was full of contradictions, which are reflected in her fictionalized autobiography, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885).

Of Another Dimension by Jeanette Lynn