Virgin Soil

Virgin Soil is a short story that belongs to Discords, of George Egerton (pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright). She was an important Australian feminist writer of the late nineteenth century.Contrary to what may seem, Virgin Soil is not a criticism of marriage, but an attempt to capture, from the point of view of a woman, those things that a man cannot understand. George Egertonembodied the ideals of the "new woman" in his stories. The text revolves around marriage, motherhood and sexuality. Her concern about marriage that we see in her literature may be related to her personalexperiences. But, as we say, she did not want to criticize marriage, but raise awareness among women. She talk about how repression affected them. In Virgin Soil is very important psychologicalstatus, ambition, dreams and desires of women. The author writes about the modern woman using a modern narrative. The novel is not compatible with ambiguous endings and it could not escape thebackstory of its characters. But in the short stories the reader can assimilate the text quickly because they have no pauses. Furthermore, in this way, she uses realism, poetic imagination and fantasy.The story revolves around three characters: Florence, her mother and Philip, her husband. Florence mother wants her daughter to marry Philip. Then she tells her that she should obey her husband.Florence does not feel anything by philip and decides to leave him and rebel against his mother
Florence refuses her husband because she doesn't love her. The author relates this to sexualpractices.This is another example of the modern style of the text and referred to the lack of sexual freedom.
On the other hand, we observe that in most of the time the characters are not called by name, butused common nouns ("the girl") or indicates a feature ("the older woman"). Perhaps what was meant Egeston highlight the general nature of these situations. That is, it was not an isolated and unique.