Edith Rickert and the New Woman Movement

Abstract

Tomasch and Gilles consider the young Edith Rickert within the context of the New Woman movement that was reshaping social, political, and cultural landscapes in the first decades of the twentieth century. In many ways Rickert fit the profile of an educated, independent, and professionally ambitious New Woman, as she forged a career as a fiction writer during this period. In line with contemporary expectations, many of her fifty short stories and novels privilege the emphatically patriarchal domestic sphere, and yet she consistently undercut the formulaic denouements that put women in their proper places. In her personal life, Rickert, unlike her heroines, created fellowships of women, as a student at Vassar, as a bluestocking in London, and later as the co-leader of the Canterbury Tales project.