Grand & the New Woman Novel

Book Reviews Grand & the New Woman Novel Teresa Mangum. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. vi + 298 pp. $44.50 CRITICS have recently begun to reassess the importance ofthat late-nineteenth-century literary movement we know as New Woman fiction. New Women themselves were the most visible agents of women's changing status at the turn of the last century. They wrote, spoke, and protested in public, championed female desire, demanded the vote, criticized masculine sexual corruption, and provoked their contemporaries by challenging Victorian conventions of how women should feel and behave . Fiction by and about New Women was popular as well as controversial , yielding bestsellers in the 1880s and 1890s and providing a convenient target for conservative critics who sought out signs of what they considered cultural degeneration. For close to a century these novels remained nearly unstudied, lost between a canonized high Victorian realism and the consolidations of a modernist aesthetic; they were disparaged as feminist propaganda rather than disinterested aesthetic artifacts . It is only in the last ten or fifteen years, and particularly since the publication in 1990 of Ann Ardis's New Women, New Novels, that critics have begun to reread New Woman fiction, with its lively mingling of genres —from realism to Utopian fantasy, adventure stories to melodrama— its deliberate interweaving of social advocacy and generic experiment. The critical studies that do so ask us to rethink the narratives of literary history, to reconsider the role of women writers and forms of feminist advocacy in shaping fictional as well as social texts. Teresa Mangum's Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel is a useful contribution to this new critical literature. Mangum focuses her discussion of New Woman fiction through one of the movement's most provocative and interesting figures, Sarah Grand. Grand merits our attention, as Mangum notes, "because, like many of her female contemporaries, she lived as well as wrote the often self-contradictory role of the New Woman." Indeed the existence of Grand's literary and political career is itself a kind of testimony to the 79 ELT 44 : 1 2001 changes in women's status in the period, for it was the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 that allowed Grand to keep the money earned from her first published novel, and thus allowed her to leave an unhappy marriage , and support herself by writing. An author of articles as well as novels, a lecturer and women's rights advocate, and eventually mayor of Bath long after her literary reputation had faded, Grand always mixed literature and activism. And her novels themselves, as Mangum suggests persuasively, form a kind of extended argument for literature as a means of activism and education—an examination of how reading might educate women to social action and of the limits of such reading's power. Mangum's particular achievement in this study is to show us vividly and concretely the historical context within which Grand argued for this educating role of the novel. Not only does she locate Grand's fiction amid the era's broad debates about the New Woman and cultural degeneration , but she places Grand's work within the institutions that shaped the novel in the period—examining her correspondence with publishers, reviews of her books in women's magazines, and reports from women's club meetings at which Grand spoke or where her work was read. Most importantly, this material allows Mangum to take seriously the category of middlebrow literature, which is often overlooked in our critical impulse to stratify culture between the more glamorous arenas of high and low, and is equally often ignored as a vital cultural category out of the presumption that commercial popularity must make all texts uniformly conservative. Instead Mangum argues that the category of the middlebrow, which was being formed at the time, lets us understand the strengths and strategies—as well as the weaknesses—of New Woman fiction like Grand's. She shows us how middlebrow culture became a vehicle for feminism in the period because its genteel focus on the improving nature of literature not only allowed...