Re-Viewing Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle: Recent Critical Trends

Abstract

It is now over 30 years since Lloyd Fernando, Elaine Showalter, Gail Cunningham, and Patricia Stubbs, among others, first redirected the attention of scholars and critics to late nineteenth-century writing about and by the New Woman. Given the current energy and widening compass of New Woman studies, it is surprising to recall that most of the pioneering early studies focused on the treatment of the New Woman in novels by men, referring to female New Woman writers simply or mainly as part of the socio-literary context of this male-authored writing. Indeed, most of these early studies tended to be rather dismissive of the female New Woman writers. Cunningham’s The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (1978) regarded them, for the most part, as minor writers, who were merely or mainly polemicists, and Stubbs’s short chapter on late nineteenth-century ‘Feminist Fiction and the Rejection of Realism’ in Women and Fiction (1979) concluded: Most of the feminist writers … just were not good enough as writers to turn their material into an important challenge to the literary tradition. This meant that at the very moment when literature was beginning to break free from the moral stranglehold of Victorian sexual ideology, the novel was dominated for the first time, and quite accidentally by male writers. (Stubbs 120)