The New Woman in Fiction and Fact

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction

   • Angelique Richardson, Chris Willis

   Pages 1-38

3. ‘Nothing But Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman

   • Talia Schaffer

   Pages 39-52

4. ‘Heaven defend me from political or highly-educated women!’: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption

   • Chris Willis

   Pages 53-65

5. Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Woman on the Move

   • Sarah Wintle

   Pages 66-78

6. Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress

   • Sally Ledger

   Pages 79-93

7. ‘He-Notes’: Reconstructing Masculinity

   • Gail Cunningham

   Pages 94-106

8. New Women and the New Hellenism

   • Ann Ardis

   Pages 107-122

9. Narrating the Hysteric: Fin-de-Siècle Medical Discourse and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893)

   • Ann Heilmann

   Pages 123-135

10. Staging the ‘Private Theatre’: Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie

    • Laura Marcus

    Pages 136-149

11. ’Scaping the Body: Of Cannibal Mothers and Colonial Landscapes

    • Rebecca Stott

    Pages 150-166

12. Capturing the Ideal: Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man

    • Carolyn Burdett

    Pages 167-182

13. ‘People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Heredity’: Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism

    • Angelique Richardson

    Pages 183-211

14. The New Woman in Nowhere: Feminism and Utopianism at the Fin de Siècle

    • Matthew Beaumont

    Pages 212-223

15. The Next Generation: Stella Browne, the New Woman as Freewoman

    • Lesley A. Hall

    Pages 224-238

16. Women in British Aestheticism and the Decadence

    • Regenia Gagnier

    Pages 239-249

17. Back Matter

    Pages 250-258

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A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins . The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.

• feminism
• fiction
• gender
• Henrik Ibsen
• novel
• women

• University of Exeter, UK

  Angelique Richardson

ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and science, and is currently working on a study of Hardy and science. She is the author of Love, Eugenics and the New Woman: Science, Fiction, Feminism and editor of Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914.

CHRIS WILLIS teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published a number of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular fiction, and co-edited Twelve Women Detectives, a collection of early crime stories.

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