Gallia (novel)

Gallia is an 1895 novel written by Ménie Muriel Dowie. It is usually categorised as a New Woman novel.

Set mainly in 1890s London and rural Surrey, Gallia is about a conventional aristocratic family with an unconventional daughter, who is the eponymous heroine of the story. However, Gallia does not openly rebel against society by, say, demanding equal rights for women or by deliberately breaking social rules. Rather, she leads a quiet, inconspicuous life, outwardly conforming to all the norms she is expected to observe. Her unconventionality is expressed in her unusual thoughts and ideas, in particular on human reproduction, which are given broad scope by the narrator. Thus, Gallia can be read as a philosophical novel.

Ever since their only child Gallia decided to get a university education about five years ago, Lord and Lady Hamesthwaite have been carefully watching their daughter's silent alienation from their world and have had their doubts if she will ever consent to marry one of the eligible young men that present themselves to the family. Gallia is attractive, healthy and clever but all the men around her agree that she never behaves in an easy-going, coquettish manner. Family and friends are occasionally shocked by the topics she chooses for polite conversation, such as politics or sex.

Since her Oxford days, Gallia has known Hubert Essex, who has embarked on an academic career and does research on Darwinian theory. It is Essex with whom Gallia genuinely falls in love. Her honesty compels her to confess her love for him, and she is devastated when she is rejected by Essex. When he tells her bluntly that his "life has no need of" her, Gallia knows that she will never be able to experience romantic love again. What Essex omits from his speech is the fact that he is suffering from a hereditary heart condition and that he is very likely to die young.

When Gallia is introduced to Mark Gurdon, an ambitious social climber who wants to get ahead within the British Civil Service, and when she realizes that he is handsome, healthy, and virile, she chooses him to be the father of her future child, or children. Gurdon, whose guiding principle in life is decency, is keeping a mistress in a studio flat in London who resorts to a self-induced abortion to terminate a pregnancy just at the time when Gurdon starts being attracted by Gallia. But Gallia does not mind: when he proposes to her, she accepts but makes it clear right from the start that she will never be able to love him.

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