Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change ed. by Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (review)

At my first academic job interview in 1981, a distinguished male Victorianist, looking at the title of my PhD dissertation, asked, “When life is so short, why would anyone want to bother reading about George Egerton?” In those days, every discussion of New Woman literature by figures such as Egerton (pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne), had to include an explanation and a defense, beginning with why it should be classified as literature at all. Thirty years of critical studies and biographies by a host of determined feminists have made an enormous difference. As Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton, editors of Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle, report in their introduction, “The New Woman is currently the subject of more … [keynote] addresses, articles, and books than at any time since the 1890s” (2). Lyn Pykett—one of those responsible from early on for this positive shift in fortunes—writes, in her survey of New Woman scholarship from the past three decades, that the enterprise has gone beyond an interest in fin-de-siècle fiction alone: “New Woman writers have been recovered and explored from numerous perspectives by literary and cultural historians and critics, and there has been a growing and important body of work on late nineteenth-century women poets and journalists and forgotten female aesthetes” (16). That turn-of-the-century women writers are now being analyzed in ways unthinkable when their work was initially recuperated may be seen in an essay such as Kathleen A. Miller’s “‘Your Loving is Unlike Any Other’: Romance and the Disabled Body in the Gothic Fiction of Edith Nesbit and Lucas Malet,” which expertly links the New Woman both to gothic modes and to disability studies, and which proves particularly illuminating on the topic of Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories—popular tales that would have had no place in any feminist dissertation thirty years ago. Nesbit, as Miller demonstrates, “uses the forms of Gothic fiction to suggest that romantic relationships, including a disabled individual’s courtship, could be an important step towards personal liberation and political change” (197).

“Change” is the leitmotif that runs throughout this collection, which sprang from a conference held at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies. “Women were authors of change in a double sense,” as the editors assert, for “they both documented the cultural shifts of which they themselves were a key symbol, and helped to bring about further change” (2–3). The essays that follow mostly succeed in illustrating this principle—which, of course, has been framed so broadly that it would be difficult for them not to do so. Thus Tracy J. R. Collins tells us (in “Athletic Bodies Narrated: New Women in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction”) that physical culture should be recognized as a crucial force in shifting feminist constructions: “The New Woman was not ‘manufactured’ in the library or at the suffrage meeting: her beginnings were in the gym” (204). Catherine Maxwell shows us the ways in which Vernon Lee drew from the examples of homosexual male writers and artists to “consume and digest [her] … predecessors’ texts in ways that nourish and sustain” her own work (176), and, in the process, created modes of writing through which a woman (and a lesbian) could represent “her own sexual and professional identity” (166). Melissa Purdue turns to the once enormously popular Victoria Cross (Annie Sophie Cory) to find evidence that “New Women used their fiction to express their ambivalence, if not outright revulsion, for motherhood much more frequently than had their mid-Victorian predecessors” and, moreover, that they depicted such resistance to maternity in the complex context of racial politics (126). Gavin contributes a lively account of Loveday Brooke, protagonist of stories from the mid...