This study focuses on the work of four Victorian anti-feminist women writers - Eliza Lynn Linton, Charlotte M. Yonge, Mrs Humphry Ward, and Margaret Oliphant - examining their self-contradictory responses to the debate about women''s role in family life and society. Individual chapters review women''s anti-feminism from 1792-1850, and fresh readings of their best-known novels emphasize the inconsistencies of their masculine and feminine ideals.