Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Women's Press on the Development of the Novel (review)

Molly Youngkin's monograph is the first comprehensive study to examine and theorize the significance of literary reviews in two feminist periodicals of the fin de siècle, Shafts and The Woman's Herald. Youngkin argues that these journals determined a standard by which to judge New Woman literature while also hastening a modernist aesthetic through their affirmation of characters' inner lives. Youngkin coins the term "feminist realism" to characterize a brand of realist fiction that depicted women's internalized consciousness and valued it as a precondition for their further acts of agency. She builds her study on three avenues to women's freedom—thought, speech, and action—and three correlative narrative strategies that novelists used to express them—internal perspective, dialogue, and description of concrete acts.

In chapter 1, Youngkin explores female characters' internal awakenings in fictions by Sarah Grand and Thomas Hardy. Fin-de-siècle theorists believed that feminist consciousness could be disseminated ethereally as "thought influence" (42), and Grand adopted this line of thinking when claiming her role as a medium for ideas already in the air. In nonfiction essays, Grand emphasized the New Woman's intelligence and the necessity for women's continuous self-education. Her novels vary in their delineation of women's consciousness. Although the eponymous protagonist of Ideala (1888) moves from self-realization to activism, a male first-person narrator limits access to her thoughts. Women in The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897) recognize their marginalization, but not all are able to transform this into personal agency.

Youngkin then turns to Hardy, arguing that because he refuses to illuminate their internal perspectives, his women lack the conviction borne of "increased consciousness" (55). Instead, they assert agency through action, culminating in Sue Bridehead's semi-comic leap through the window to avoid Phillotson and Tess Durbeyfield's murder of Alec. Youngkin concludes that as speakers both women are unable to navigate and dispute the ideological discourses marshaled against them. Summarily, New Woman critics such as Dora Montefiore and Mary Eliza Haweis recognized inconsistencies in Hardy's character development but praised his representation of women's struggles against cultural conditions.

Chapter 2 focuses on the spoken word, juxtaposing George Gissing's techniques in representing Rhoda Nunn and Nancy Lord against Mona Caird's more measured attribution of internal perspective and dialogue to female characters in The Daughters of Danaus (1894). One reviewer asserted that Rhoda Nunn forfeits intellect by recoiling from Everard's alleged adultery, but Youngkin rightly qualifies this claim, tracing scenes of Rhoda in contemplation, albeit late in the book. Gissing's development of Nancy Lord betrays a similar unevenness, for, after showing promise, Nancy compromises her feminist resistance by the novel's conclusion. By contrast, the women's press lauded Caird's protagonist Hadria Fullerton for exercising thought, speech, and action in her efforts to negotiate a balance between liberty and duty. Youngkin contextualizes Caird's investments by referencing her nonfiction and public debates on marriage and suffrage in women's clubs and the press.

As chapter 3 reveals, the feminist press charged novelists with envisioning vigorous, assertive role models. George Meredith's plots, however baroque and obscure, pivoted on women's acts of resistance; his Diana of the Crossways (1885) was particularly praised in the women's press. More complexly, Ménie Muriel Dowie's writings on female adventure offer a self-contradictory slant on the action-oriented woman. The impulsive heroine of A Girl in the Karpathians (1891) frequently acts without any clear political intent, but upon observing Eastern practices is compelled to question Western constructs of female propriety. Dowie's later Women Adventurers (1893) celebrates historical women who disguised themselves as soldiers by following their husbands to war, yet in the preface...