Generational Critique and Feminist Politics in The Heavenly Twins and The Voyage Out

Abstract

ABSTRACTA familiar but misleading dichotomy – between the political engagement of the New Woman writer and the aesthetic detachment of the modernist one – registers the generational dynamics at play in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915). Each novel resists the literary conventions and political tactics of its predecessors: Grand's stance differs from that of Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853), while The Voyage Out challenges the literary conventions and activist mentality of Grand's era. Yet twenty years after the publication of her first novel, in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf would go on to make an argument that itself advocates feminist activism, having perceived that the problems New Women aimed to solve were still at issue, drawing on the example of Gaskell's older contemporary, Josephine Butler, for inspiration, while continuing to ignore Grand's example. Arguing that these differences among women writers are not only political or aesthetic, but also generational, I analyze the figure of the prostitute in the two novels so as to demonstrate how generational differences shape the formal choices these women writers make, the ideological projects they undertake, and the affinities and antagonisms they establish across time.