As Susan C. Shapiro notes in ‘The Mannish New Woman: Punch and its Precursors’, the woman who struggled to break the binds that society placed on her because she was female has probably been around as long as civilization. ‘In reality’, says Shapiro,

In looking at New Woman fiction of the 1890s, we often see that these novels strikingly place their female protagonists in opposition to the image of the New Woman that developed in the popular press, such as Punch, in the 1890s. That is, the authors set up a dichotomy of the ‘good’ New Woman (without ever using this term) against the ‘bad’ New Woman.

By perpetuating the stereotypical ‘manly’ New Woman in Red Pottage in the form of a minor character, Mary Cholmondeley more effectively presents her audience with a feminist agenda that may ultimately transform society. More importantly, through the characters of Hester Gresley and Rachel West – specifically through their friendship – she offers a sophisticated model of womanhood with which readers could identify without feeling they were abetting feminism. While Red Pottage often is classified as a New Woman novel, it rarely is aligned with more radical texts, such as Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893), Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) and Mona Caird's Daughters of Danaus (1894). However, the novel does reveal an active feminism. In at least one important scene in the novel, which I discuss later, there exists a marked difference between what Cholmondeley has her characters say or how they behave and the feminist ideology that is revealed by those conversations or actions.

Cholmondeley also considers the necessity of forming a ‘New Man’ to help replace the stifling patriarchal agenda of the nineteenth century.