Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s–1930s: Women Moving Dangerously (review)

James Tissot's painting of an independent young woman traveller standing on the platform at Willesden Junction, circa 1874, adorns the cover of Wendy Parkins's sparkling new study. While Tissot entitled the work Waiting at the Station, the image prompts the familiar notion of a woman's modernity defined through her ability, and disposition, to go places. Parkins invites us to look again at the loose equation drawn between women's mobility, agency, and modernity. Rather than demonstrating a Victorian or early-twentieth-century world in which women achieved agency through mobility and thus became modern, her study suggests a continuing preoccupation with the uncertainty of where that mobility might lead, in space, time, and "emotional geography" (15).

Usefully spanning the period from the 1850s to the 1930s, the study links the world made new by railways to that transformed by the novelty and exhilaration of aeroplane and automobile travel. Too often the domain of separate intellectual endeavour, discussion of the Victorian period is illuminatingly extended into the era often characterized by its "high modernity." The 1850s world of Elizabeth Gaskell's Margaret Hale in North and South (1855) and George Eliot's Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorel in Adam Bede (1859) is followed by the 1880s "travelling companions" (48): ouida's Moths (1880) and Vernon Lee's Miss Brown (1884), both of which have protagonists living far beyond the borders of England. Mona Caird's heroine Hadria in The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage (1899) represent the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Fleeing domesticity, Cholmondeley's characters embark on an even longer journey at the end of the novel, setting sail for the antipodes of Australia and New Zealand.

To this point, Parkins suggests, women novelists sent their heroines on a range of journeys, increasingly ambitious in scope but limited in how far they realize a transformation of their condition. Caird's Hadria flees to Paris by boat and train but ultimately cannot find a home there. Ouida's and Lee's characters' travels promise something but end in confinement, disappointment, and danger.

With the political novels of the early twentieth century, Elizabeth Robins's The Convert (1907) and Ellen Wilkinson's Clash (1929), the prospects of mobility are more optimistic. Vida Levering, Robins's heroine, travels to London to observe for herself whether what she has heard said over country tea tables about the ridiculous garb of suffragette speakers is true. She follows the Women's Social and Political Union's Ernestine Blunt about the streets of London, recognizes that being a spectator is not a neutral act, and becomes committed to the suffrage cause. In so doing she is transformed from society ornament into political actor. Joan Craig, the trade union organizer in Clash, travels to London during the General Strike (1926). There she enjoys a greater range of cultural and social life than is available to her in the modest coal-mining villages of her northern home. She is also drawn into an affair with the left-wing writer Tony Dacre. Both Vida and Joan renounce the romantic possibilities of their London sojourns to pursue political lives.

In the final two chapters the danger of mobility is present along with a marked acceleration in the pace of characters' material and emotional lives. In part this is what Parkins wants to emphasise about the unevenness of modernity and mobility: good and bad elements continue to coexist. She is also pointing to the mode of mobility. Characters travel by aeroplane and automobile, often extolling the sensory delight of freedom and power bestowed by speed and altitude. In perhaps the most intriguingly divergent pair of novels, Elizabeth Bowen's literary To the North (1932) is discussed alongside Stella Gibbons's middlebrow pastoral parody, Cold Comfort Farm (1932). For Gibbons's character Flora Poste the country is a place where life is complicated and...