The American Girl and the New Woman

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article sets out to explore the use to which the figure of the “American Girl” was put in that late nineteenth‐century fiction which brought her into collision with English culture. Looking particularly at the work of Rhoda Broughton and Elizabeth Bisland (A Widower Indeed, 1892), Sara Jeannette Duncan (An American Girl in London, 1891, and A Daughter of To‐Day, 1894), and Ella D'Arcy (The Pleasure‐Pilgrim”, 1895), it argues that their provocative heroines may display some of the independence of mind and body associated with the New Woman, and are used to critique contemporary English society, but they resist being read in the same terms. In turn, this apparent illegibility to an English audience is reflective of broader anxieties concerning new American culture, and the difficulty of assimilating it within English patterns of representation.