Among the many metaphors that have been devised to account for the interactive aspect of the reading experience, that of the literary text as a game has found particular traction among cognitive and rhetorical narratologists (Ryan 2001, Korthals-Altes 2014). Restricting the focus and extending the metaphor, this paper proposes to think of narrative perspective as a textual phenomenon oscillating between the two acceptions of the phrase “mind game”; that is, as ranging somewhere along a spectrum going from intellectual play (perspective-taking as training key cognitive abilities) to psychological manipulation (perspective-taking as shaped by textual and/or authorial design). Late nineteenth-century “New Woman” short fiction, with its overt political aims and stylistic diversity, provides a productive case study for investigating these two dimensions of narrative perspective and their contribution to the text’s overall ideological force. Building on David Herman’s notion of storyworlds as both “perspectivally constrained and perspective-affording constructs” (2002) and on Richard Walsh’s redefinition of focalization as interpellation (2007), this paper offers a tentative typology of New Woman fictional forms according to their degree of ideological determinacy and uses it to reflect on the wider potential of narrative to either train or restrain critical thinking.