Here Dora Russell reclaims the figure of Aspasia not as a mere consort of Pericles but as an intellectual foremother—bold, articulate, and dangerously ahead of her time. Russell uses Aspasia as both symbol and catalyst, drawing a lineage between ancient defiance and the modern feminist struggle for autonomy, education, and the right to shape public discourse.

In Artemis: The Early Struggles of Feminism, Dora Russell summons the goddess not as mythic huntress but as a symbol of untamed female independence, channeling her into a broader meditation on the earliest eruptions of feminist resistance. The chapter traces a lineage of rebellion—quiet and forceful alike—against patriarchal confinement, casting Artemis as both metaphor and precedent for the fierce, often solitary path carved by women demanding more than silence.

In Jason and Medea: Is There a Sex War?, Dora Russell revisits the ancient myth not for its romance or tragedy, but as a searing parable of betrayal, power, and the persistent asymmetries between men and women. Through the volatile figures of Jason and Medea, Russell probes the psychological and structural roots of gendered conflict, suggesting that the so-called "sex war" is less a battle than a reckoning centuries in the making.

In Woman as a Supernatural Being, Richard Le Gallienne offers an ethereal vision of femininity untethered from earthly concerns—casting woman not as subject but as symbol, an ineffable presence glimpsed through poetry, myth, and moonlight. What emerges is a fin-de-siècle reverie that flatters even as it confines, revealing more about the author's longing for transcendence than about women themselves.

With her trademark irony, Eliot exposes the absurdities of "silly novels," populated by impossibly perfect heroines and drenched in melodramatic moralizing. Yet beneath her cutting humor lies a more serious plea: for literature to aspire to honesty, complexity, and humanity.

Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party is a shimmering example of modernist short fiction, a narrative that glides gracefully on the surface of a single day while plunging into the unsettling depths of class, mortality, and self-awareness.

Guy de Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi is a taut and scathing short story that captures the brutal absurdities of war and the quiet defiance of the oppressed.