The Fin de Siècle: 1890s & Late Victorian Culture

New Woman Fiction: 1881-1899

“The figure of the ‘New Woman’ is notoriously hard to pin down. She was variously derided in the late nineteenth century press as mannish and unattractive, over educated and hysterical, unsexed and oversexed. The very ambivalence of this image of the New Woman was often useful to her opponents, who had a seemingly endless range of stereotypes to fall back on in discussing her exploits.

Punch regularly entertained its readers with satirical rhymes and fanciful cartoons designed to undermine the claims of the New Woman to greater economic and social freedom. Not surprisingly in the face of such hostility, not all late Victorian feminists identified themselves as ‘New Women’, but all had an interest in engaging with the figure presented to them and according to which they were judged. But while there is some consensus as to which writers of this period can be identified thus, the authors themselves never offered a unified or cohesive account of their aims. New Woman writing of the late Victorian period may insist on the sexual purity of both men and women, or by contrast, demand greater sexual freedom outside marriage. Some writers offer a realist account of the lives uneducated women were obliged to lead if they failed either to marry or to obtain suitable employment; others offer a more romantic account of the special qualities brought by the woman of genius to the writing of fiction. New Woman writers may be openly committed to the social questions of their time, or quietly subversive of the ideological trappings that sought to deny them a voice. Some worked tirelessly in the cause of social equality, while others insisted on the innate difference between the sexes. The wide range of New Woman fiction published in the last two decades of the nineteenth century is far from revealing a recognisable position with which contemporary feminists could identify.

Rather these texts indicate a complex, often tangled, web of questions about woman’s potential and the social forces that continued to shape her experience.”

(Text quoted from Pickering and Chatto Publishers Leaflet).