In Illusion the readers meet a new woman, the very “sensible” and “gentlemanly” Miss Bruce. Miss Bruce is every inch a respectable new woman, having a British character and a part of higher middle class. In order to maintain being a proper “artist” of the Parisian Salon, as being a “woman” and also an “artist” are incompatible, she must give up her femininity; her status and mobility is always under a critical eye. The narrator, in having to go through Miss Bruce’s wardrobe, reveals that Miss Bruce has actually made “frivolous” feminine purchases, dresses, make-up, and nightgowns. Miss Bruce, while a “new woman”, still longs for beauty and some amount of femininity—and the narrator understands, “I knew. …I knew it all;…the perpetual hunger to be beautiful and the thirst to be loved which is the real curse of Eve, well hidden under her neat dress, more or less stifled, more or less unrecognized.”

It is through the scene when the narrator is going through Miss Bruce’s wardrobe that it is suggested that being a new woman is not really good social development. Being a new woman is not just about denying femininity, but rejecting the female identity entirely by being “sensible” and “gentlemanly”. It is setting up a new class of women but it is not a positive growth, at least the way Rhys presents it; the new woman is a woman acting as a man, not actually independent or any freer from societal standards and norms than the usual woman. The new woman has to adhere to acting more like a gentleman, and has to reject what is perceived as feminine frivolity, like beauty. If the “new woman” truly meant that women had more social mobility and freedom, there would not be requirements, but the new woman would be able to do as she chooses, whether she chooses to marry, live alone, be beautiful, be sexually free, and the list goes on. Rhys is showing in Illusion that it is not just Miss Bruce living an illusion, but that the “new woman” is a social illusion.