'Play with the stories a little while': Mobility of mind in short fictions by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, George Egerton and Sarah Grand

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, George Egerton and Sarah Grand were mobile women who produced far-ranging fictions. Based on both sides of the Atlantic, all four were influenced by the advances in communication and travel technology that led to the rise of a shared “magazine culture” near the end of the nineteenth century. Using this medium to participate in the debate about women's potential, they tested social and literary conventions, and offered up the short story—replete with open-ended possibilities—as a vehicle for women's self-creation.; This dissertation examines the lives and short fictions of four British and American women authors who made similarly unconventional life choices. Though they worked (with varying degrees of success) in multiple genres, each recognized the short story as a liberatory vehicle through which they could defy the conservative impulses of the novel, and explore new representations of womanhood. Revisiting these fictions in their original contexts illuminates the importance of the short story for women authors at odds with their available role models, female and male, literary and personal.; In chapter one, my study of Gilman's early magazine, The Impress , and of her short story series “Studies in Style,” traces her “play” with the works of canonized writers, and her experimentation with the concepts of imitation and originality. Similarly, chapter two explores Vogue magazine, the original setting of Chopin's most subversive fictions, to underscore her transatlantic gaze, and to establish her engagement with women readers grappling with multiple and contradictory notions of femininity. Chapter three draws on Egerton's relationship with John Lane and The Yellow Book to explore her version of aestheticism, and to consider the special demands she made on the readers of her last three short story collections, Discords (1894), Symphonies (1897) and Fantasias (1898). Finally, chapter four recovers Grand's short story collections, Our Manifold Nature (1893) and Emotional Moments (1908), to highlight the connection between literary experimentation and a new “mobility of mind” generated by women writers of the 1890s.