| This project explores the surprising continuities between the two marginalized Fin-de-Siecle genres: the New Woman novel, associated with the social reform movement of the same name, and the formulaic New Girl fiction accompanying an emergent girls' subculture. Although New Woman fiction is often presumed progressive and New Girl fiction conservative in its gender politics, both express ambivalence toward feminist social change. The resulting contradictions within the texts are precisely what make them so interesting and, in some cases, enable them to do feminist cultural work, either by discreetly presenting radical ideas under conservative wraps or by teaching critical reading and thinking practices. This characteristic ambivalence is also evident in the ways that both genres---one ostensibly political, the other popular---understand the relationship of fiction to social reform. Focusing on representations of reading and writing within the novels illuminates the complex relation of the sexual and textual politics within first-wave feminism and situates both genres within larger late-century debates regarding the relation of literature to life.; Chapter one introduces the New Woman and the New Girl, locating both within a larger literary and cultural context. Chapter two surveys the fiction of L. T. Meade, the most prolific and popular New Girl writer, juxtaposing moments where she supports the New Woman agenda with those where she undermines it and exploring the implications. Chapter three looks closely at two of Meade's novels. Merry Girls of England (1896) critiques and intervenes in girls' reading practices while The Time of Roses (1900) explores women's anxiety of authorship, drawing on anti-New Woman rhetoric to propose an alternative feminist aesthetic. Chapter four studies two novels readily recognizable as New Woman fiction, Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1897) and Ella Hepworth Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman (1894). As "representative texts," they illustrate the multiple levels on which New Woman fiction is self-contradictory. Chapter five treats two more obscure New Woman texts, Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage (1899) and Mabel E. Wotton's "The Fifth Edition" (1896). These texts may seem more conservative, especially in figuring the woman writer in maternal terms, but put conventional images to radical ends. |
