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

Molly Youngkin’s book aims to shed new light on the New Woman novels written at the fin de siècle and the feminist press that reviewed them. By examining book reviews from the Woman’s Herald and Shafts, she demonstrates that these magazines saw potential for social and political change embedded in literary representations of reflective and empowered women.

Youngkin, who is assistant professor of English at California State University, lays out her credentials as a methodical archival researcher in her detailed introductions to the magazines. The Woman’s Herald (which began life as the Women’s Penny Paper and finished as the Woman’s Signal) went through several editors, including the feminist activists Henrietta Müller, Lady Henry Somerset, and Florence Fenwick Miller, all of whom emphasised the practical and communal work needed to achieve social reform. In contrast, Shafts was edited continuously by Margaret Sibthorp, whose membership of the Theosophical Society testifies to her more philosophical engagement with the same issues. Youngkin’s grounds for choosing to focus on Shafts and the Woman’s Herald are that both magazines shared a similar aesthetic in their literary reviews, what she calls the “feminist realist” aesthetic (7).

Youngkin elucidates that this aesthetic meant approval of three modes of feminist assertion within the texts reviewed: a transformation of the heroine’s consciousness in order to realise her subordinate condition, an articulation of this condition through spoken word, and the use of action to attempt to change these circumstances. This might initially seem like a somewhat schematising assignment of a shared perspective between several reviewers (some of whom wrote anonymously) over a number of years. However, each of Youngkin’s ensuing chapters elaborates on these modes of asserting female agency (thought, speech and action) by examining pairs of late-century texts reviewed by the magazines. These chapters reveal the nuances within this systematic and politicised feminist aesthetic. By pairing Sarah Grand with Thomas Hardy, George Gissing with Mona Caird, and George Meredith with Ménie Dowie, Youngkin shows that male and female writers were judged by the same realist aesthetic in both Shafts and the Woman’s Herald. Furthermore, Youngkin’s own writing assimilates the criteria set out by these feminist reviewers. She explicitly states that she will not “suppress my own feminist ideals in my analysis of texts” (32). In doing so, she opens out new readings of novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles alongside strident analyses of lesser-known texts, such as Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians. These analyses are always framed by the notion of greater or lesser degrees of success in asserting the three modes of female agency.

A final chapter argues that both Shafts and the Woman’s Herald saw George Moore’s Esther Waters as the ideal fulfilment of their feminist literary aesthetic and also that Moore shaped his fiction with the three principles of the feminist aesthetic in mind. The circuits of influence between author, publisher, reviewer, and reading public here become interestingly complicated. By examining the text in this light and concentrating on the reviews by Gertrude Kapteyn and Florence Fenwick Miller in Shafts and the Woman’s Herald respectively, Youngkin asks us to rethink conceptions of Moore’s relationship with the late-century feminist community.

The major problem brought to light by Youngkin’s analysis is that of the status of realism at the fin de siècle. She argues convincingly that realism in these magazines, and in the novels they reviewed, was being stretched and redefined to incorporate a greater degree of female subjectivity than had been the case before the fin de siècle. While anti-realism, she argues, has been considered by scholars like Sally Ledger as the motivator of change from the Victorian to the Modernist aesthetic...