Making room: British women writers, social change, and the short story, 1850--1940

Making Room: British Women Writers, Social Change, and the Short Story, 1850-1940 reveals how women writers participated in the contentious debates regarding women that dominated the Victorian and modernist periods. Stories written by Elizabeth Gaskell, M.E. Braddon, George Egerton, Evelyn Sharp, and Katherine Mansfield commented decisively upon contemporary anxieties in Britain and its colonies about where women could live and travel, how they could be identified, and whether they could be contained. This study's exploration of the ways in which location inflects codes of conduct offers critics a new way of considering how ideologies regarding gender roles in a growing middle-class society are constructed within spaces like the home, the city, and the frontier. Moreover, by addressing the critically neglected form of the short story within the context of periodical publications, this project participates in the recovery of an entire field of fiction that played a substantive role in the literary marketplace of the Victorian and modernist periods. By publishing their works in the rapidly expanding periodical press, these women writers inspired social change by altering the way that people viewed the world—and the women—around them.;The first two chapters of this project analyze how the hearthside, the drawing room, and the threshold become sites of crisis in stories that dramatize anxieties regarding middle-class definitions of family and marital relations. The second half of the dissertation examines how massive shifts in populations affected perceptions of women in the streets, omnibuses, and stairwells of London and the terrain of the British colonies. As protagonists in these stories self-consciously perform alternate gendered identities in those unstable locations, they dismantle prevalent categories of femininity. Each of the four chapters offers a case study of the ways a particular writer used their chosen periodical venue to develop a unique form of short fiction. The chapters examine Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Cranford' series in Household Words, Mary Braddon's Belgravia ghost stories, Evelyn Sharp and George Egerton's New Woman stories in the Yellow Book, and Katherine Mansfield's contributions to the modernist magazine Rhythm .