The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siecle Feminisms (review)

Burgeoning interest in the New Woman has extended the path of feminist scholarship into fascinating and fruitful new terrain. As critics have recuperated ignored writers and texts, the complex intersections between the New Woman and Victorian cultural discourses have gradually appeared, revealing the crucial role this iconoclastic figure played in gender construction at the fin de siècle. Seminal studies have not only produced compelling readings, unearthed historical details, and shared indispensable insights, but they have also suggested intriguing new directions for other scholars to pursue. The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms continues this vital undertaking with its engrossing collection of essays.

A number of prominent critics—including Sally Ledger, Ann Ardis, and Regenia Gagnier—are represented in this important resource, which probes a wide array of topics, texts, and tendencies in fourteen essays. Part of the book's project is "to offer a representative expression of the liveliness of current scholarly debate on the New Woman" (12), and the text certainly achieves its editors' objective. Some selections were derived from papers presented at the 1998 New Woman Conference in London, which helps account for the diversity of approaches represented in the volume. Although essay collections based on paper presentations sometimes are fragmented, this text has smoothly integrated its many threads of scholarship by emphasizing the multivalent connotations and permutations of the term "New Woman." As Lyn Pykett argues in a perspicacious foreword, the New Woman "was (and remains) a shifting and contested term" that designates "a mobile and contradictory figure or signifier" (xi). The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact, Pykett rightly adds, "admirably resists any tendency (as its editors put it) to homogenize the category" and "no doubt [...] will encourage others to continue 'unpacking' the term" (xii).

The book's essays can be classified loosely by topic: the contextualization of the New Woman, relationships to leading intellectual and social movements, detailed readings informed by the subgenre's broader cultural milieu, and gender politics in Victorian science. The book's introduction provides an instructive overview—both for experts in the field and newcomers—of women's position in late-nineteenth-century England. Seemingly poised "[o]n the cusp [...] between fiction and fact," as the editors remark, the New Woman occupied "a vital and popular part of the late Victorian cultural landscape" through her representation in novels and as the subject of intense controversy (1). This cogent introduction surveys such integral topics as employment, education, marriage legislation, and moral reform while providing a wonderful assortment of cartoons from Punch and other contemporary sources. Talia Schaffer advances the volume's contextual efforts with a thought-provoking dissection of the rhetorical moves underlying debates over the term "New Woman" itself. In her scrutiny of the 1894 exchange between Sarah Grand and Ouida, Schaffer analyzes the stakes involved in fictionalizing and constructing the identity of this controversial entity. Chris Willis shifts the contextualizing lens to representations of the New Woman in "commercial" as opposed to "polemic" fiction and foregrounds the telling impressions that popular literature presented to a mass readership. Additional topics addressed in this contextualization category include a temporal continuum of sorts, with Henrik Ibsen's "invention" of the English New Woman at one pole and a twentieth- century version of the figure at the other.

If we turn to our second category, the relationships between the New Woman and other movements of the fin de siècle, we find Ardis illuminating the vexing implications of the New Hellenism's gendered perspective on intellectuality and the movement's "casual but nonetheless aggressive sexism" (108). Choosing texts by Olive Schreiner and Ethel Arnold, Ardis examines reactions to a prevailing "homosocial paradigm" (108) that "dis-enabled rather than encouraged female intellectuality, erased rather than articulated...