A concern that virtually all late-Victorian and early-Edwardian writers had to negotiate, explicitly or implicitly, is the nature of Englishness. In the face of intense colonisation, sexual anarchy and class upheaval, the turn-of-the-century writer is often assumed to either resist all challenges to sexual, racial or social hybridity by insisting that Englishness is firmly male, white and upper-middle-class or allow a certain, often gothic or colonial, manipulation of this category. For example, in the novels of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad there is a sense that Englishness can be either benevolently adapted or catastrophically altered through its confrontation with the native. Similarly, in the writing of Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf, English sexual identity is directly or furtively dislocated, allowing a limited transformation of the category of Englishness. From this perspective, it is tempting to view British writers as either mapping hybridity or conservatively resisting all forms of cultural transformation. However, as this article seeks to demonstrate through a reading of Richard Marsh's provocative novel The Surprising Husband (1908), some British writers negotiated these two positions without resolving either.