During the 1890s Ella D'Arcy was regarded as one of the most promising writers to emerge from the pages of the Yellow Book. As subeditor of and regular contributor to that quarterly, D'Arcy participated in a literary avant-garde often influenced by the "New Realism" of naturalistic French fiction. Her own most notable short stories exhibit a psychological realism and an unsentimental treatment of character and situation that have suggested to critics affinities with Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant, as well as George Gissing and Henry James. Her harsh characterizations of women in the age of the "New Woman" have led some to oversimplify her perspective as antifemale without considering her stories' implicit indictments of male assumptions about women.

Thematically concerned with issues of courtship and marriage, art, religion, and sexuality, D'Arcy's work responded to contemporary debates on gender and relations between the sexes...