A Woman-Hater was published by Blackwood in 1877, serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1876, and it is one of Reade’s most thematically interesting late novels. Vizard, a wealthy young man, has been jilted and has sworn off women entirely, retreating to his estate with a determination to live in misogynistic isolation. His resolve is undermined by the arrival of three women who each challenge a different dimension of his prejudice.
The most significant of these is Rhoda Gale, a young woman determined to become a doctor at a time when the medical profession was almost entirely closed to women. Reade’s treatment of Rhoda’s struggle — she studies medicine, faces hostility from male students and professors, and is denied access to examinations — was based on the real experiences of women like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake, whose campaigns for admission to British medical schools Reade had followed closely.
The novel is uneven — Reade was aging and his plots had become increasingly mechanical — but the Rhoda Gale sections retain their power. Reade, who had built his career on exposing institutional injustice (prisons, asylums, trade unions), found in the exclusion of women from the professions a cause perfectly suited to his temperament: a system of cruelty maintained by convention and defended by people who considered themselves civilized.
Collecting A Woman-Hater
First edition (Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1877): Three volumes, cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, three volumes: $80–$200
- Single-volume editions: $10–$25