SOURCE: "Fœmina Vera in Charles Reade's Novels," in PMLA, Vol. 46, Autumn, 1931, pp. 1260-79.

In the following excerpt, Sutcliffe discusses Reade's often negative portrayal of women and his depiction of women characters who disguise themselves as men or act in traditionally masculine ways.

One of the commonest headings in the notebooks on which Charles Reade founded his novels¹ is fœmina vera. He considered himself an authority on woman. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette he calls himself "a patient drudge, who has studied that sex profoundly in various walks of life."² Certainly his women are more memorable, and the subject of more comment and criticism, than his men. To them W. D. Howells devoted a long essay in his Heroines of Fiction. Though, like his men, they fall into easily recognizable, frequently repeated types, they are more alive, more real, less subordinate to the demands...