Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London by Elizabeth F. Evans (review)

This deeply researched, sharply argued, and lucidly written monograph exemplifies modernist scholarship’s ability to evolve in diverse, inclusive, and expansive ways. Evans’s gorgeous volume brings together texts both canonical and marginalized, as well as overlapping critical lenses, including spatial theory and identity studies, to argue for the centrality of “new public women” in liminal urban spaces in popular and imaginative discourses of the modern period—from 1880 through the late 1930s for the material under study (5). Evans brings a genuine curiosity about a period rich in innovation and transformation in historical and literary terms, as well as a noteworthy commitment to breaking down barriers and to expanding the possibilities of literary study. The range and diversity of authors included is matched only by her confident assembling and deployment of both traditional and interdisciplinary methods of analysis, to argue that “the recurrent trope of the modern woman in liminal urban spaces provides a method for bridging modernism’s formal experiments and its social investments” (2). Bridging, in fact, might be the controlling metaphor of this study, as it favors inclusion of marginalized artifacts over canonical gate-keeping, and embraces intersecting multiplicities over narrow singularities. Bridging also captures the central term of this study, as “new public woman” gestures to its association with both the new woman and the prostitute, who dared to exist within the threshold locations of urban modernity.

Threshold Modernism loosely unfolds chronologically and delineates the key sites around which commentators and writers associated “middle-class women’s increasing urban presence” in London’s “threshold spaces” such as shops, clubs, and streets (5). Each chapter surveys a particular pairing of type and site, with the first chapter, “Modern Sites for Modern Types,” featuring an analysis of the barmaid (as seen in Ulysses’s ‘Sirens’ episode and elsewhere) as emblematic of the way “women were often active negotiators of the male gaze” (28). Her term “spectacality” describes women’s “dynamic use of the status of spectacle” in their interactions with men in public spaces, and she posits that the barmaid, as highly visible and predominant type of new public woman in the late nineteenth century, “suggested to some a sexual availability similar to that of the casual prostitute” (28, 31). This underlying preoccupation with the perceived or potential sexuality of women in public spaces runs through the material Evans surveys, and emerges as the book’s overarching theme. Subsequent chapters turn to “Shops and Shopgirls,” “Streets and the Woman Walker,” and “Women’s Clubs and Clubwomen,” as major sites and types deployed in literary texts and debates carried out in the popular press via cartoons, editorials, and letters from readers. The last chapter, “New Public Women through Colonial Eyes,” slightly departs from the book’s overall focus, but its incorporation of marginalized viewpoints on the new public woman phenomenon ultimately provides a conclusion that not only connects colonial subjects to more central figures, but also opens up the book’s methodology and archive to further explorations.

The chapter on shops and shopgirls includes close readings of James’s The Princess Casamassima, Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop, and Gissing’s The Odd Women, with detailed maps plotting character development and thematic strands at the street level through movements between locations and neighborhoods. The shopgirl “may be the most prevalent and the most persistent” among urban types of the period, in part because she embodies contradictions “expressive of widespread anxiety” around the blurring of “boundaries between domestic and commercial space,” and literary texts register public concern around the shopgirl’s “sexual availability” and the potential for geographic mobility to turn into a more threatening “social mobility” via counter-jumping (37, 41, 42). Evans argues for the centrality of Millicent in James’s novel as both product and producer of modern London, she draws valuable attention to Levy’s little known novel as an argument for the...