Figuring the New Woman: Writers and Mothers in George Egerton's Early Stories

Abstract

Recent critical reevaluations of fin de siecle England have catalogued the contradictory attitudes held by and about New Women:1 they were oversexed or asexual, championed free love or advocated stricter standards of purity, embraced eugenic attitudes toward motherhood or threatened the future of the race by rejecting maternity outright, eschewed the private sphere's domestic duties to fight public battles for improved educational and professional opportunities or flaunted their self-absorption by exhaustively anatomizing their emotional and psychological states. Even such a brief overview shows the absurdity of attempting to draw up a coherent, ideologically consistent list of the attributes and aims of the New Woman, but it is possible to identify the cluster of related concerns her advent sparked. The debates that raged around this figure in the 1890s repeatedly return to questions of female sexual desire, maternal identity, and women's representations of women. Neither the mother nor the woman writer was a new figure in Victorian conversations about the parameters and perquisites of feminine identity. However, the discourses that emerged in the 1890s presented these familiar figures in a fresh light; the decade was characterized by its concern with female authors' and mothers' curiosity about and interest in themselves as women and as individuals with identities and interests dis-