Women's Fiction Research Articles

From a "Child of Light" to a "Woman of Genius": Sarah Grand's The Beth Book as the New Woman Bildungsroman

The New Woman fiction, popular in the last decade of the 19th century, contested the traditional notions of gender roles and participated in the public debates on women’s rights. The protagonists of the New Woman novels refused to conform to the submissive and self-abnegating Victorian ideal of femininity. The article discusses the ways in which Sarah Grand, a prominent New Woman novelist and social activist, uses and transforms both the elements of her own life and the Bildungsroman conventions in her 1897 novel The Beth Book to create a heroine whose growth and development result in her personal independence and her active public engagement in women’s issues. Cast in a variety of social roles, Beth Maclure reclaims her agency and becomes an embodiment of the New Woman.

The women of N. K. Jemisin: Representations of women and gender roles in the science-fantasyThe Fifth Season

AbstractThe following paper deals with representations of women and gender roles in science-fiction and fantasy. It briefly discusses the issue in these genres in general, but it is primarily concerned with one specific example, i.e. N. K. Jemisin’s science-fantasy novel The Fifth Season. The paper’s main aim is to highlight the changing nature of representations of women in science fiction and fantasy and pay tribute to a literary work depicting women from a modern perspective. Thus, it presents the analysis of said novel from the perspective of feminist criticism and gender studies, focusing on how the novel explores through its main and side women characters, ideas of representation, biological sex versus “gendering”, and related notions of femininity, gender roles and gender stereotypes and myths.

The Victorian Actress in the Novel and On the Stage, by Renata Kobetts Miller

Reviewed by: The Victorian Actress in the Novel and On the Stage by Renata Kobetts Miller Lauren Eriks Cline (bio) The Victorian Actress in the Novel and On the Stage, by Renata Kobetts Miller; pp. xiii + 250. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, £75.00, £19.99 paper, $110.00, $24.95 paper. The intersection of theater and the novel has been a busy one in recent years, and it has seen a fresh flow of traffic from theatrical thoroughfares. Studies like Michael Meeuwis's Everyone's Theatre: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), Carolyn Williams's "Melodrama and the Realist Novel" (2018), and Victoria Wiet's "The Actress in Nature: Environments of Artistic Development in Victorian Fiction and Memoir" (2018) have made a compelling case for taking popular theater seriously as a shaping force in the [End Page 605] development of the more thoroughly studied Victorian novel, as well as in the formation of Victorian aesthetics, ideology, and cultural practice more broadly. Within this field, Renata Kobetts Miller's The Victorian Actress in the Novel and On the Stage focuses particular attention on the figure of the performing woman, which she argues became a site of generic competition between theater and the novel. By tracking shifts in the ways authors of both drama and fiction represent actresses, Miller constructs a narrative of how these two cultural forms influenced each other through the second half of the nineteenth century. This period is often associated with the novel's ascent to middle-class respectability, and The Victorian Actress traces how novelists used fictional women performers to test their form's relative ability to represent subjectivity and to address a respectable audience. But Miller also suggests that the actress's tendency to raise questions about authenticity, domesticity, and publicity allowed the theater to push back—and that by staking its own claim to aesthetic realism, Victorian drama produced greater changes in the novel than have previously been remarked. In making this case, Miller draws from a varied archive of sources, including canonical novels from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–8) to Henry James's The Tragic Muse (1889–90); popular plays like Dion Boucicault's Peg Woffington (1845) and T. W. Robertson's Caste (1867); dramatic criticism by figures like George Henry Lewes and William Archer; and archival materials related to suffrage organizations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While each chapter includes some extended case studies, the chapters also follow the actress across new constellations of texts—making connections between works like Diderot's dramatic essay The Paradox of Acting (published in 1830), Edward Lancaster's theatrical interlude "The Manager's Daughter" (produced at the Haymarket in 1837), and Charles Reade's novel Peg Woffington (1853). In doing so, Miller produces a historical narrative whose turning points are different than those typically found in histories of either the novel or the theater when those genres are considered separately. Chapter 1 connects Victorian theories of mimicry with Victorian anxieties about class mutability to argue that in the 1840s and 50s, representations of the actress grounded her authenticity in her class identity in order to limit her ability to disrupt social hierarchies. Chapter 2 tracks how this strategy of containment shifted in the 1860s, as plays and novels used the actress's ability to mimic social qualities to destabilize the structures that held class in place. Chapter 3 examines the role of performing women in George Eliot's work, and Miller lingers with a particularly under-read example in the closet drama Armgart (1871). In contrast to visions of the woman artist as a figure who transcends or eschews the public, Eliot's Armgart uses her talents to embrace a broader audience and, through that audience, to influence the public sphere. By concentrating on her representation of exceptional women, Miller suggests that Eliot's actresses laid the groundwork for both the anti-theatrical backlash against courting popular readership in George Moore's A Mummer's Wife (1885)—which stands at the center of chapter 4—and eventually for the Actresses' Franchise League's use of suffrage drama to challenge the ideology of separate spheres—which forms the...

Female (Anti-)exemplain Plinian and Ovidian Letters: Rebellious Women's Silenced Battles

AbstractThis article does not discuss the intertextual allusions to Ovidian epistolography in Pliny's letters, but puts forward the claim that women in both Ovid's and Pliny's letters are part of a female literary culture that implicitly clashes with the conventional gender patterns of what constitutes a female exemplum and a female anti-exemplum. This article presents Pliny's letters as both prescriptive and descriptive, and argues that the texts extol as well as advocate specific patterns of behavior, including that of the ideal wife. The examination of the Plinian text is enriched with a parallel reading of Ovid's letters in the Heroïdes, in which fictional women appear as “enabled” to rewrite their pseudo-biographies, even though these are composed and “edited” by a male poet. In reexamining Ovid's unconventional female mythological constructions vis-à-vis the Plinian perception of distinguished women of Roman history, the reader is eventually encouraged to reconsider some well-established views on Pliny's social, cultural, and political “conservatism.”

The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

Re-reading Noir

ABSTRACT This article considers Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader in relation to the author's current research on Cold-War American women's crime fiction. The dominant critical framework about this fiction from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is noir, a masculinist genre about male loners / outsiders that often embraces a cynical or nihilistic worldview. Many of these books objectify women and feature a spider woman or femme fatale, who is punished for her pursuit of self-interest and use of her sexuality to attain power. The lesser-known female crime writers of the period were–in many ways–resisting readers of this tradition. Their re-readings and rewritings often privileged community and connection over isolation and offered more complicated female characters. The author uses the case of Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison (1956) to make this case.

The development of linguistic and cultural meanings of English colour lexis: dynamics and modern state

The article is devoted to the study of the dynamics of development and the current state of linguacultural meanings in colour terms that are used in English-language women’s prose. In the course of the analysis of the theoretical and methodological material, it has been revealed that the colour terms in the literary text contribute to the fact that the descriptions and pictures drawn by its author are perceived as correctly as possible by the reader, and the latter more accurately perceives the sensations and emotions experienced by the characters at different moments of the story. During the analysis of the corpus of selected contexts (more than 700 fragments) with colour terms (500 units) from the works of fiction of modern women’s prose – criminal literature of the British writer Elizabeth Haynes – a number of features have been established. All the analyzed works are rich in the use of various colours, generally the main ones, and their shades, but there are also other colours. Thematic groups of colour terms include descriptions of the appearance of the main and secondary characters, everyday realia of the surrounding world, phenomena and objects of the natural world, and other abstract notions. Frequently occurring primary colour terms that do not have a transfer of meaning have been distinguished, and less frequent secondary colour terms with a transfer of meaning, and the secondary ones usually had a more complex morphological and syntactic structure. The selected colour terms that describe the appearance of the characters and have a transfer of meaning are divided into two groups, one of which includes colour terms with a metaphorical component, and the other contains colour terms that form transferred epithets. Within the framework of the description of natural phenomena and objects, the authors distinguish fully metaphorized colour terms, partially metaphorized colour terms that include a metaphorized component that does not extend its influence to the other structural elements of the colour term, as well as colour terms represented by an explicit comparison. In general, colour terms fill the work with a deep content, an additional meaning that the author lays down when writing a literary work.

Concept of ‘New Woman’ and Indian Women Fiction Writers

Literature is one of human creativity that has universal meaning as one of the way to communicate each other about the emotional , spiritual and intellectual experiences that needed to build up intellectual and moral knowledge of mankind . A creative writer has the perception and the analytical mind of a sociologist who provides an exact record of human life, society, and social system. Fiction , being the most powerful form of literary expression today, has acquired a prestigious position in Indian literature. Indian women novelists in English and in other vernaculars try their best to deal with , apart from many other things , the pathetic plight of forsaken women who are fated to suffer from birth to death.

EMOTIONAL NARRATIVES OF WOMEN WRITERS OF THE SECOND CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD

Ayşe Zekiye, Hayriye Melek ,Şehbenderzade Pakize,Salime Servet Seyfi and Safiye Vefik who are takes place between women writers of the Second Constıtutıonal Period. In their fictional texts, generally emotionality that puts women at the center is intence. In these works that written by women writers about women using the women's point of view, are told sad or tragic stories of virtuous,innocent and beautiful women. In this work, Bir Pederin Hatası of Ayşe Zekiye, Zühre- i Elem of Hayriye Melek, Nihal of Şehbenderzade Pakize, Bir Hatıra-i Pejmürde of Salime Servet Seyfi, Muhaberât-ı Hakikiye of Sadiye Vefik that have been written in the Second Constitutional Period and these are an example of emotional novel, have been selected subject of study. It will be examined whether the person, subject and themes seen in the santimental novel are included in these works or whether there are features of aesthetic items. It is stated that the sentimental novel mostly focuses on life of a sensitive and emotional woman. Thematically, it describes the conflict between the heroine's individual desires and social value judgments. The narratives are resolved in the context of clashes of fictional women or their torments. Also, it will be determined that how authors deal with women's issues and whether they include a new type of woman by fictional work. Keywords: Conflict, conflicting duties, light touch, tableu, sentimental novel, woman writer

The Image of Woman in Hindi Fiction: An Outline of Krishna Sobti’s Select Novels in Translation

Krishna Sobti’s all novels are unique. Each has different characters with different set of issues. She is a class in herself when it comes to portrayal of women characters. Woman, undoubtedly is an architect of herself, her individuality as an imaginative being. Her discourse in the novels of Sobti has been balancing. Most of the times, Sobti woman is a strong rebellion of her silence. Her discourse and attitudes are a challenge not only to marginalised position but also their repressed individuality and suppressed desires. Wherever and whenever they raise their voice, their discourse obtains unique identity and recognition. This paper talks about the image of woman in Hindi fiction in general and in the novels of Krishna Sobti in particular. Her three translated novels, to Hell with You Mitro (2007), Sunflower of the Dark (2008), and Memory’s Daughter (2007) have discussed. Sobti presents panoramic image of woman in her novel which have been unmatched hitherto. Her women characters are rebellious, submissive, timid, outspoken, sexually passionate, courtesan, widows, single parent, rape victims, so called Sati-Savitri, stereotype, archetype and many other kinds. She proves herself as the representative fiction writer of Hindi literature.

Publications of Lucja Barbara Rautenstrauchowa in the V. Stefanyk NSL of Ukraine in Lviv fund, as a sample of sentimental literature of the XIX century

Purpose of research. The main task of this work is the analysis and characteristics of the Polish writer Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's lifetime publications, which are in the collection of Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv. The research methodology of the writer's fictional prose includes the general analysis of the printed writings, elaboration of typology, description of provenience symbols on copies, characteristics of the proprietary inscriptions on the researched editions. Scientific novelty. In the process of working on the article, we conducted scientific and bibliographic research of Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's writings, analyzed prose works, researched and described the origin and proprietary inscriptions, which indicate the history of the existence and preservation of copies. The presented lifetime publications are typical samples of Western European sentimental literature of the ХІХ century. The figure of the novelist is interesting from the point of view of the representative of that time. Conclusions. The articleseeks to analyze the concept of the personality of woman and woman writer of the XIX century, as well as thematic aspects of women's fiction, despite the marginalization of women's contemporary literary works. By way of example of individual writing, attention is focused on the identification of the narratrix who chose the first person narration. Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's prose is sentimental and autobiographic. All events in the writings are conveyed by the author through the prism of her personal perception. A woman writer proves her subjective, feminine perception of the world through romantic travels. The travel genre in the ХІХ century became one of the leading in Western European literature, and Łucja Rautenstrauchowa's prose phenomenon is to introduce her own works with the artistic perception of the role of a woman and the adoption of the latest concept in contemporary society. Thus, in the process of working on the article, we researched and revealed the biography of the writer Łucja Rautenstrauchowa, analyzed her prose and created a scientific and bibliographic description of printed publications in the collection of the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv.

Deconstruction of the Racist-Sexist Stereotypes in Alice Walker's Novels

This study holds that the analysis of any stereotyped construct disfunctions that stereotype. From this perspective, it dessects the stereotypes, constructed at the junction of race and gender which are well addressed in the novels of Alice Walker. It lays bare the western politics of representation which deploys the strategy of typifying humans in order to marginalize some people or Black women in this regard. This paper finds that instead of engaging herself in the binary practice of countering the canon, Walker depends on the methods of deconstruction, i.e., appropriating, re-defining, and re-assessing the negative tags commonly associated with Black women. She ventures to argue that the systems of racism and sexism converge to stereotype those women across the world. Her works offer complete Black feminist narratives where those women raise critical consciousness to break through the conventional assumptions about them. This study asserts that the subversive activities of Walker’s fictional women turn into reframing those purposive constructs. It first explores the mechanism of stereotyping implied in the studied novels and then analyzes why those stereotypes deserve re-interpretation and re-evaluation. In this regard, Walker, her fictional women, and this researcher meet to re-consider those negative images of Black women with a grave intention of re-generating cultural diversity and equity.

Providence and the sacred womb: La estirpe de la mariposa and women’s place in Spanish national historiography

ABSTRACT Within the last quarter of the twentieth century and now well into the twenty-first, the historical novel has been a prolific and popular form in Spain for commentary on the dictatorship, the Transition and contemporary politics, as well as a vehicle to reimagine and revise the more distant past. This article examines La estirpe de la mariposa – poet Magdalena Lasala’s first foray into narrative fiction, published in 1999 – as a product of this period of collective rethinking. Seeking to shift the historiographical focus from men to women in medieval Iberian history, La estirpe traces the lineage of five mostly fictional women that are imagined to have shaped and influenced the great men in caliphal Córdoba. This article analyzes the mechanisms the novel employs to refocus national historical narratives on women and their historical contribution to Spanish society, identifying several specific historiographical strategies employed by canonical Spanish National Catholic histories that not only are resuscitated in La estirpe de la mariposa but are at the heart of the portrayal of the female protagonists.

Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer

Reviewed by: Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels by Dale M. Bauer Rachel Ihara BAUER, DALE M. Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 172 pp. $99.99 hardcover; $80.00 e-book. An ambitious study of four popular American women writers, Dale M. Bauer's Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels proceeds from the premise that understanding a serial author requires reading beyond a few texts in order to grasp "the entirety of an author's production" (2). This is no small task given the prodigious output of the authors under consideration: E.D.E.N. Southworth (approximately fiftytwo novels), Ann Stephens (twenty-six), Laura Jean Libbey (possibly seventy novels), and Mary Jane Holmes (thirty-nine). Such numbers boggle the mind, and the time and devotion involved in tackling all of these novels, with their convoluted plots and beset heroines, is impressive indeed. The study that results aims to make sense of this abundance of plots, in order to chart the particular themes and preoccupations of each author while also making an argument for their shared interest in narratives of female suffering (as a result of sham marriages, bad men, mistaken identities, and bouts of insanity), suffering that is provisionally resolved in abrupt conclusions (through sound marriages, restored senses, and transformed identities), before being taken up again in the next serial. Building on, yet diverging from, early studies of popular women's fiction, like Helen Papashvily's All the Happy Endings (1956), which dismissed serial plots as "simple" (xiv), and Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction (1978), which saw in these novels "'a single tale' with 'one overplot'" (xv), Bauer seeks to do justice to the rich and varied issues taken up by these authors. For instance, while critical attention to Southworth's best-known novel, The Hidden Hand (1859), might lead to an assumption that cross-dressing represents her primary challenge [End Page 308] to gender norms, Bauer sees mental breakdowns in Southworth's characters as more typical of Southworth's strategy for highlighting and confronting various societal ills. One challenge in adopting this all-encompassing approach is that it requires a command of a substantial number of novels, most of which will be unfamiliar to all but a few scholars of American literature. This means that Bauer's claims about texts and their significance rest, to a large degree, upon plot summaries. While these glosses are intended to illuminate the points being advanced, often they seem to exceed the critical purpose accorded to them, pointing to alternative interpretations and avenues of exploration. For example, Bauer frames a discussion of Southworth's novel The Fortune Seeker, or The Bridal Day (1866) as an instance of Southworth's return to the idea that "moral equilibrium between the sexes ends monomanias of all sorts, which caused the cultural and personal irresponsibility that she wanted her novels to redress" (22–23). Yet what follows, ostensibly to illustrate this point, is a summary of the adventures of the novel's heroine, Astrea, who is captured on her wedding night, is disguised as a "quadroon" and sold, is compelled to rebuff the sexual advances of her purchaser, and temporarily loses her reason, before regaining her senses when she is reunited with her husband. This plot outline, while it provides evidence of repeated themes in Southworth's oeuvre (villains preying on young women, racial disguise, mistaken identities, brain inflammation, and spouses separated and reunited), does not clearly support a reading of Southworth's fiction as primarily concerned with women's suffering and temporary insanity as social critique. This may be an issue of method as much as material. The sheer abundance of "data," along with the need to convey to the reader, in broad strokes, the outlines of the many novels under discussion, constantly threatens to overwhelm any unifying argument that seeks to bring these texts together. Bauer's aim, to do justice to the messiness and variability that characterizes these novels, individually and as a whole, is to be commended. However, in reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels, I couldn't help but wonder if there might be another way to capture the...

Intercultural Dialogue, Diaspora, and the Divided Self in Nasrallah's Canadian Fiction (2004)

This article looks at the second part of Dimitri Nasrallah's novelBlackbodying(2004), which takes the form of an embedded novella, “Canadian Fiction.” This novella explores how an immigrant's traumatic diasporic experience silences intercultural dialogue in an inhospitable Toronto. Drawing on the conceptual framework of internalization, this study first examines the stigmatizing condition of the immigrant in exile, which projects a whimsical obsession with Heidi, a fictional woman, as a nostalgic object of desire. Second, the novella underpins the loss of real-life dialogue that disfigures Sameer's genuine pursuit of social integration. This study, therefore, argues that the loss of the ideal not only traps immigrants in a never-ending chase but also threatens their very capacity to recreate third space realities. Third, the study negates the often-romanticized meta-narrative of successful immigrants living in welcoming cities.

Deconstruction of the racist-sexist stereotypes in Alice Walker's novels

Abstract This study holds that the analysis of any stereotype construct undoes the functionality of that stereotype. From this perspective, it dissects certain stereotypes constituted at the junction of race and gender which have been incorporated in the novels of Alice Walker. It lays bare the Western politics of representation which deploys the strategy of typifying ‘others’ or Black women, in this context, to marginalize. Walker's works offer Black feminist narratives where once paranoid women raise critical consciousness and challenge conventional assumptions about them. The subversive activities of her fictional women end up reframing those purposive constructs. This paper first explores the mechanism of stereotyping the Black women from its study of three selected novels of Walker and then analyzes why those stereotypes deserve re-interpretation and re-evaluation. It finds that instead of engaging herself in the binary practice of countering the canon, Walker offers through her novels appropriation, re-definition or re-assessment of the racist and sexist tags commonly associated with Black women. In this regard, Walker, her fictional women, and this researcher meet to introduce new dimensions to those stereotypes and advocate for considering cultural diversity and cultural context which shape Black women. To study the stereotypes, this paper takes on a deconstructionist approach, proposed by Collins. For analysis, it also relies on hooks' concepts of Western double-edged standards and Hall's ideas of stereotyping the ‘other’ and politics of representation. It uses content analysis method, limiting itself to look into relevant parts of the studied novels.

«Empathetic Speakers of the Age»: the Work of Women Writers of the 1850s

The article is devoted to the little-studied phenomenon of «women’s» prose of the 1850s — the most mature period in the creative evolution of female writers. The authors’ attention is focused on the issue of the emergence of this phenomenon, as well as on the problem of the artistic originality of the works of fictional women. The study attempts to characterize the prose of female authors in the genre aspect. The corpus of the works studied in the article may be of particular scientific interest — many of them have not been reprinted since the publication.

Tomboys in Sarah Grand’s New Woman Fiction

Abstract Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Babs the Impossible (1901) both feature overtly tomboyish protagonists, in what I argue is an effort to shift notions of femininity and gender identity and to adopt gender-neutral qualities as features of the New Woman – qualities such as independence, comradeship, and loyalty to other human beings. In this essay, I argue that Grand attempted to soften resistance to the New Woman by focusing on tomboyism in childhood (utilizing people’s tendency to feel favourably towards children) and then extending tomboy qualities to New Womanhood while providing the Victorian public with an exemplar of independent and robust femininity. The critical difference between a prototypical tomboy figure and the one in New Woman fiction is that the latter keeps their tomboyism after maturity, sublimating the trait into her inborn self, faithful to herself and her ideas. Beyond the trope of the childhood tomboy, Grand aimed to bolster and strengthen womanhood by adopting tomboyism as an extension of a inborn self and redefine notions of acceptable female behaviour, thereby expanding the scope of womanhood.

Understanding the Victorian Unfeminine

My project traces concepts of the unfeminine from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1860) to Victoria Cross’s New Woman fiction in Six Chapters of a Man’s Life (1903). Both texts feature female characters who defy Victorian standards of femininity. Marian Halcombe of The Woman in White is regarded as “ugly,” with “almost a moustache,” yet Walter Hartright (the narrator) admits to the “rare beauty of her form” when he meets her. Marian is also extremely intelligent, using her wits and courage to help protect her half-sister. The unnamed male narrator of “Theodora” from Six Chapters of a Man’s Life meets a similar female character (Theodora), who also has a mustache and looks “like a young fellow of nineteen.” Nonetheless, Theodora is highly educated, even advocating for sex for sex’s sake. Though Theodora is unconventional in her appearance and character, the narrator grows more attracted to her. In defiance of their conventionally unfeminine physical and mental characteristics, both women are regarded as striking by their male narrators. I examine these characters’ unfeminine appearance and heightened intelligence in combination with their radical desirability, suggesting that parallels between Marian and Theodora establish a firm connection between these two Victorian genres as they construct concepts of attraction and the “unfeminine” woman.

Collapsing the Courtship Plot

The New Woman writing of the 1890s grappled with the legacy of mid-nineteenth century constructions of romance and gender ideology. In their bid to promote a new vision of heterosexual relations between the sexes, New Woman writers often explicitly engaged with earlier ideals of Separate Spheres and the “Angel in the House.” The short story provided an ideal form for exploring these issues, freeing writers from the generic conventions of the traditional three-volume novel. This article examines the ways in which three women writers of the 1890s attempted to rewrite the script of mid-Victorian courtship through the short story genre. In different, but related ways, Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s “One Doubtful Hour” all offer a challenge to the doctrine of separate spheres. Yet, while each of these texts critique what they present as outmoded views of woman’s sphere and nature, they also articulate the difficulties experienced by both genders in imagining an evolved and improved model of sexual relations. These short stories represent the collapse in New Woman fiction of the traditional “courtship plot” through a failure to re-imagine and re-map the mid-Victorian gender ideology they seek to dismantle.