The New Woman and colonial fiction: Rosa Campbell Praed and Victoria Cross

New Woman writers of the fin de siecle created a distinctly different body of literature that reflected their concerns about women's limited role in society. Although New Women did not always agree on solutions to the problems that faced them, their texts did all engage themes such as marriage reform, social activism, motherhood, equality in education, sexual freedom and greater career opportunities. However, while New Women fought openly against the patriarchal practices of their society, the extent of their involvement in other progressive causes is less clear. The New Woman's relationship with imperial ideology, for example, is particularly interesting to explore because it was during the fin de siecle that Britain aggressively expanded its empire. New Women were often viewed as a danger to society and to the integrity of that expanding empire. While a good deal of criticism has already been devoted to adventure or colonial fiction by male authors like H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and to women and the empire earlier in the century, very little has been written on New Woman authors. Do they offer a different portrayal of the empire? Do they indeed challenge imperial ideology as their opponents claim? This dissertation explores the New Woman's relationship with the empire by focusing on two authors who have been largely ignored. It examines the work of Rosa Campbell Praed, who wrote many novels set in Australia, and Victoria Cross, who wrote Anglo-Indian fiction. These authors were chosen in part because very little has been written on either of them, despite the great popularity of their work during the late nineteenth century, and also because each lived for long periods in the colonies about which they wrote. My dissertation attends to the ways in which these women resisted, participated in, constructed and represented the contradictions they found within their colonial experiences.;Keywords. New Woman, Colonialism, Victoria Cross, Rosa Campbell Praed, fin de siecle...