Reviewed by: British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space by Kate Krueger Randi Mihajlovic (bio) Kate Krueger, British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Pp. vii + 260, $100 (cloth). In British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space, Kate Krueger explores how women writers used short stories to redefine gendered spaces. She defines these spaces as “locations wherein social interactions are governed by expectations surrounding masculine and feminine behavior” and thus avoids the simplistic division of public and private spheres in favor of examining specific ideologically invested physical locations and the bodies acting within those spaces (1). Through a historical, social, and architectural framework, Krueger advances interrelated arguments about space, gender, and genre in short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, Evelyn Sharp, Barbara Baynton, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys. Krueger selects short stories that depict heroines transgressing gendered spaces, and she directs equal attention to the short story’s engagement with contemporary cultural and political debates surrounding the Woman Question, as well as the innovative qualities of these short stories, in order to track how these women writers contributed to the genre. The first two chapters examine domestic interior spaces. Chapter 1 considers Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrayal of spinsters at the center of domestic spaces, like the drawing room and parlor. Krueger concludes that in Cranford Gaskell not only transformed the sketch tradition by focusing on female character development in interior spaces but also revised family-associated domestic spaces to include spinsters. In later Cranford stories, Gaskell disrupted these domestic spaces further by demonstrating their [End Page 257] flexibility in accommodating economic activities. Krueger draws attention to the significance of Cranford’s location within Dickens’s Household Words—a periodical with a reputation for normative depictions of bourgeois domesticity—in providing an ideologically charged family space that Gaskell could exploit. In chapter 2, Krueger credits Belgravia and Temple Bar for providing venues in which Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Rhoda Broughton could voice controversial rhetoric on the warped nature of the bourgeois home through ghost stories. Braddon and Broughton used ghost stories to disturb the popular conception of the home as a domestic space founded on an ideal woman and an idyllic marriage. By depicting homes that are subject to haunting due to unstable marriages and women’s failure to embody the idealized roles impressed upon them, Braddon and Broughton contributed to contemporary debates regarding women’s roles within domestic space. The next two chapters move out of the British domestic interior. In chapter 3, Krueger considers how George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, and Evelyn Sharp used the avant-garde, New Woman-friendly venue of the Yellow Book to rewrite urban spaces. These writers modernized the short story genre by reinventing the flâneur narrative convention of mid-century literary impressionism, which tended to privilege the male narrator’s gaze and to misread or erase bodies moving through urban spaces. Krueger demonstrates how Egerton’s, Mew’s, and Sharp’s works highlight women’s awareness of this conventional gaze by depicting women who perform or mask their identities in cosmopolitan spaces in order to manipulate others’ perceptions. Further, these short stories subvert the conventional gaze by framing women as urban observers who challenge the hierarchical position of the viewer over those she views. In chapter 4, Krueger examines how Barbara Baynton and Katherine Mansfield developed the modernist short story as they complicated gendered notions of colonial spaces. Krueger reads Baynton and Mansfield together since they both rejected the romanticized trope of the isolated, self-sufficient colonial woman as the heart of colonial civilization and offered alternative representations of women failing to live up to this feminine ideal. Despite the similarities of their work in terms of colonialism and modernism, Baynton and Mansfield are often separated into different canons. Krueger contends that the placement of Mansfield’s work in Rhythm resulted in an emphasis on the aesthetic elements of her work rather than on her colonial critique, positioning her as part of the European modernist tradition; meanwhile, Baynton’s association with the colonial realism...