British Women Short-Story Writers

KRUEGER’S STUDY of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women short-story writers is a provocative discussion that includes little-known works. Indeed, my primary complaint is that I wish she had offered even more examples to demonstrate her thesis that women writers create female protagonists who overcome the limitations placed on women by “redefining their boundaries and, in so doing, revise dominant narratives of femininity.” Besides introducing readers to a variety of writers, some of them unfamiliar, Krueger also provides an overview of places where these women published. While most readers of British Women Writers and the Short Story will know about Household Words and The Yellow Book, they are likely to be less familiar with Rhythm or with the conventions of publication outside England and how those conventions may have impacted the response to writers published in them. Similarly, while most readers will know Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys, they are likely to be less familiar with Evelyn Sharp and Barbara Baynton.

Coordinator of Women and Gender Studies at Arkansas State University and a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, Krueger has already published on Sharp, George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, and Woolf. Looking at the development of the short story as a genre, she divides her book into four main chapters on writers and their works plus an introduction that provides an overview of the study and a concluding chapter that examines Woolf and Rhys. There is also a sixteen-page bibliography and a thorough section of notes that provide both publication details and interesting information about specific works. However (and this is a minor criticism for Palgrave Macmillan), I always hope for footnotes rather than endnotes and find it annoying to flip back and forth between text and notes.

While the literature of the period Krueger has chosen to explore would seem to be dominated by the novel, she begins her introduction by observing the “explosion in periodical publishing” that began in the 1850s and continued into the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters point to the development of the short story as a genre and to the relationship between the form and the places that published short stories. Recognizing that many existing studies privilege the novel, Krueger demonstrates the importance of the short story to the development of modernism. Most interesting to me, however, is the connection between literary innovation and the resistance of these writers to contemporary ideas about gender. Her introduction draws attention to Mudie’s Select Circulating Library and to John Ruskin, who both influenced conventional behavior, identifies the restricted geographical locations in which appropriate feminine behavior took place, and demonstrates how the writers featured in this study rebelled against conventions.

The first chapter begins with the spinster ladies of Cranford and demonstrates that Gaskell’s sympathetic portrayal of these usually marginalized characters is genuinely revolutionary. She also demonstrates that Gaskell changes the conventional village sketch into a series of interwoven stories that transform both interior domestic space and the women who reside in that space. By focusing on a group of elderly spinsters and showing their development, Gaskell asks readers to examine their assumptions about both traditional female spaces (especially in Cranford the drawing room and the parlor) and femininity. No longer objects of ridicule or pity, these women as drawn by Gaskell are revealed as heroic agents of change. Finally, Gaskell focuses her readers’ attention on some of the most pressing problems that faced women at the time.

The chapter on Gaskell is followed by a chapter on the ghost stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Rhoda Broughton. Krueger demonstrates that the haunted houses in stories such as “Eveline’s Visitant: A Ghost Story” (Braddon) and “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth” (Broughton) often reveal problems at the heart of the home. Their short stories, instead of reinforcing the Ruskinian idea of the woman as queen presiding over her home, expose domestic problems and use the haunted house as commentary...