Suffering sisters: Fellowship and the body in British New Woman and Socialist novels

This study demonstrates that late-Victorian female writers of New Woman and Socialist novels strategically use images of bodies exhausted, in pain, and even starving to death in order to promote their progressive social and political agendas. Focusing on representations of physical distress, these authors called upon their contemporary readers to empathize with their afflicted characters and thereby to accept the new forms of female independence, interpersonal relationships, and/or economic justice that their novels sought to promote.;Intertwined with their representations of suffering bodies, the works examined here also feature themes stressing the human needs for fellowship and belonging. In these works, New Woman protagonists, budding Socialists, and/or impoverished London workers all struggle to find companionship, friendship, and even romantic involvement with like-minded others.;Chapter One discusses four urban New Woman novels, arguing that the female protagonist seeking independence in London must suffer a period of physical stress and want in order to find lasting fellowship with the New Man. Chapter Two moves out to the English countryside to find creative New Women stifled, and the most progressive New Men actually killed off, by rural conservatism.;Chapter Three looks at Socialist novels featuring New Woman protagonists who must either purify their bodies of the traces of sumptuous capitalistic consumerism or retrain their bodies and minds to live in newly-formed Socialist homes. Chapter Four examines the London novels of Margaret Harkness, herself a progressive New Woman, finding that she uses fictional images of the suffering bodies of the London poor in order to spur her middle-class readership on to an acceptance of Socialist principles.