A Study in Contrast: The views of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley in their perspective classes During the early 1900’s, after the death of Queen Victoria, the European world went through a great change under the influence of the Free Women’s movement and WWI. It was a time of great confusion, women were faced with choices unheard of before, and having to fight against what they had been taught their entire lives. Characters like Brett Ashley from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises “presented the image of the short-skirted, shimmying, seductive, sleek femininity promising unprecedented freedom for the twentieth-century.