Gender and Social Resistance in Marie Corelli’s The Young Diana

This article explores The Young Diana’s subversive depiction of social norms and the novel’s particularly complex representation, given Corelli’s conservative brand of feminism. In this novel, Corelli’s depiction of feminine disempowerment and control showcase an almost militant response to social attitudes that prize women exclusively for sexual attractiveness to men, but which consistently undervalue or despise female intellectual achievements. The eponymous heroine’s initial confinement within culturally-constructed female roles – daughter, fiancée, spinster – is overturned when, after being used as the subject of a scientific experiment, she regains her physical youth and beauty. The heroine’s allure to men of all ages becomes, in this work, an instrument of retribution and a social commentary on the standards by which women are unequally judged, arguing for greater equality – of a kind – between the sexes.