Between the 1870s and the 1930s in England an unprecedented number of women writers entered the public sphere as essayists. Whereas George Eliot established the Victorian ‘woman of letters’ as a commanding presence, a generation later the New Woman arose as a complex figure shaping ‘The Woman Question’ for twentieth-century writers like Virginia Woolf. This period between the Victorian and modernist eras saw an increase in women’s political writing on suffrage and the anti-war movement. Yet, the literary place of women’s protest writing in this period remains opaque. Focusing on Woolf’s experiments with a hybrid ‘novel-essay’ in The Years and Three Guineas alongside Vernon Lee’s political essays as precursors, this chapter argues that the modern literary essay developed in tandem with the protest essay. This approach allows for a consideration of the political stakes and achievements of hybrid experiments with the essay that revealed the inseparability of politics and aesthetics.

The term “romantic friendship” was coined in eighteenth-century England to describe relationships between women that were passionate, intense, and exclusive. The sexual potential of such relationships were seldom discussed by those outside the dyad. When two women of the aristocracy, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, ran off together in 1778, their friends were relieved to know that “no serious impropriety had been committed” because, as one of them wrote, “There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.” Romantic friendship between women, depicted in several eighteenth- and nineteen-century American literary works, was described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1849 as “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life.” The term “Boston marriage” was coined in the late nineteenth century, when women’s increasing economic independence—enjoyed particularly by the “New Woman”—meant that their same-sex love relationship need no longer be a “rehearsal” for heterosexual marriage. With the popular dissemination in the twentieth century of the ideas of late-nineteenth sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, romantic friendships and Boston marriages came under suspicion as being “sexually inverted” or “lesbian” and therefore pathological.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

This chapter explores William Morris’s developing views about the ‘woman question’ across his life, focusing in particular on his comments within press interviews, his literary works, and his interpersonal relationships, be this with employees, friends, or family. It considers the past scholarship on this topic, which has tended to focus on debating whether Morris can be considered a ‘feminist’ or not. It emphasises that although Morris agreed in the need for adult suffrage for all and at times actively promoted progressive causes such as equal pay and the need for sexual freedom (even within marriage), he did still believe women had different roles to play to men in society, although these views could be inchoate and ill defined. The chapter showcases how Morris’s views were shaped by the male-orientated networks he inhabited in his political and professional life and by contemporary anxieties about the supposed effeminacy of artistic men. Moreover, it examines his views in relation to others within the networks of fellowship which made up the socialist and women’s movements, to situate and compare his views, and to best explore how Morris’s writings and ideas contributed to public discourse about women and gender at the brink of the twentieth century.

Focused on metropolitan consumer centres in which new sexual identities were bought and sold, this chapter explores how mass-market businesses stimulated, satisfied, and contained female desires, often at the same time. Consumer behaviours are a nexus of bodily and psychic desires understood through a language of seduction. Since the mid-nineteenth century, businesses have channelled, commodified, and promoted female sexuality to sell new products, shopping spaces, and leisure activities. Cities offered both licit and illicit, sexual and consumer pleasures. Their urban geographies are the living proof of our argument that in modern capitalist societies, sexuality is a commodity, commodities often are erotic, and the spaces and communities in which they are exchanged contribute to the making of consumer and sexual subjectivities. The marketing of eros therefore did not simply emerge with the twentieth-century sexual revolution, but rather was central to the history of modern capitalism. By examining the overlapping histories of the marketing of female consumer and sexual pleasures in diverse places, this chapter explores the role of sex and sexiness in the modern marketplace and challenges liberal assumptions about agency, liberation, and progress embedded in the history of the sexual revolutions of the late twentieth century.

The American New Woman is an archetype for the generations of women who, in the early twentieth century, were engaged in defining new forms of femininity and forging new public identities, through work, leisure, art, education, and politics. The New Woman also signaled a complex, and sometimes contradictory, modernizing of embodied femininity. Beginning with the New Woman as a sociopolitical individual, mobilized in feminist discourse and suffrage politics, this chapter goes on to explore Greenwich Village women, Black women’s responses to the New Woman, fashions for bobbed hair, and the bodies and performances of different kinds of women dancer (Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Irene Castle). The chapter concludes with Djuna Barnes’ ambivalent encounters with the fashionable New Woman in her work, and Gertrude Stein’s engagement with the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, a crucial pioneer for the women’s suffrage movement and modern feminism, in her final opera The Mother of Us All (1947).

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

In this chapter the author probes beneath the melodramatic surface of the story of Count Dracula, to reveal more subtle narrative threads, relating to Bram Stoker's critical social observations, both looking back in time, where many metaphorical dimensions of ‘blood’ are in play, and forward in time to late-nineteenth-century changes in gender relations, particularly as encapsulated in the figure of the ‘New Woman’. Just as blood-steeped history is conspicuous on the melodramatic surface of the fiction, so a forward-looking, scientific, and liberated future is discernible just beneath that surface.

Along with industrial modernity’s obsession with planning came the idea that the state should take an active role in planning its population: in Foucauldian terms, the rise of biopower, or the idea that population was a political, social, and biological problem. Francis Galton’s ideology of eugenics, developed in the 1880s and at peak popularity in the early twentieth century, suggested that the state should encourage certain people to reproduce while discouraging others in order to address the problem of the differential birth rate, or the overbreeding of the ‘unfit’ poor, which, it was feared, would lead to the degeneration of the British race. A reformist agenda committed to rational reproduction and national efficiency became central to radical feminist and socialist politics. This chapter explores how literary writing from 1900 to 1920 reflects, circulates, and challenges this constellation of ideologies about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. In particular, it considers how and why early twentieth-century writers frequently turned to the Bildungsroman, a form whose generic conventions depend on and encode both the experience and the epistemology of transition.

CH 4: Flora Annie Steel and Violet Jacob participated in the late nineteenth-century romance revival that harkened back to the adventure stories pioneered by Walter Scott. The imperial romance’s focus on cultural conflict and conquest and its exotic settings were the antithesis of the everyday life that Steel’s and Jacob’s countrywomen tended to depict. However, Steel and Jacob did not simply imitate or borrow wholesale the generic conventions developed by Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson but instead challenged the imperial romance’s cult of manliness. Steel drew on the conventions of the New Woman novel to foreground women’s participation in the adventures of empire-building. She critiqued the masculine exclusivity of adventure fiction, but not the imperial ideologies it propagated. Jacob’s novels take male adventurers as their protagonists but turn the imperial romance’s focus on conflict and conquest inward in two senses, from Britain’s overseas empire to its Celtic peripheries, and from physical to psychological struggle. Set in Wales and Scotland, Jacob’s novels explore the borderlands where English policies and practices meet indigenous traditions, and where divided cultural allegiances lead to moral conflict.

CH 3: The New Woman, a figure that emerged in the fin-de-siècle novel, was a decidedly metropolitan phenomenon. Yet novels by sisters Mary and Jane Findlater and their better-known contemporary Mona Caird explored the possibility of a Scottish New Woman, recognizing the peculiar impediments to economic and intellectual independence faced by women in rural Scotland. Employing aesthetic techniques that foregrounded their own artistry, including impressionistic reveries, abrupt shifts in perspective, and elaborate symbolism, Caird and the Findlaters suggested that the capacity to appreciate and create beauty is the defining characteristic of Scotland’s New Woman. Caird represents the Scottish landscape as a source of inspiration for her musical protagonist but condemns the conformity demanded by Scottish society as antithetical to the development of her considerable genius. By contrast, the Findlaters suggest that women’s artistic development is possible within the limitations imposed by Scottish society, albeit on the small scale that they employ in their own novels.

The queer femme disrupts the legibility of queerness and politics since the feminine is scapegoated for its subjugation as false and inferior. This essay explores the cultural genealogy of queer femme invisibility by reading white women physician characters in late nineteenth-century New Woman novels in relation to the science of sexology and feminist dress reform as contrapuntal forces that informed the viability of gender expression. Henry James’s The Bostonians, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and William Dean Howells’s Dr. Breen’s Practice present variations on the cultural dichotomy between femme and science framed by the marriage plot. Through the politics of dress the possibility of the queer femme is both acknowledged and erased as a legitimate expression and valid identity. These novels trace an incipient femme sensibility bound to whiteness that disrupts assumptions about the coherence of representation required for viability of minoritarian gender identities.

This chapter focuses on novels by George Sand, Marcelle Tinayre, Rachilde and Colette, along with a series of lesser-known works from the July Monarchy to explore the relation between gender and the novel in nineteenth-century France. While it would be impossible to write a history of the nineteenth-century English novel without making women writers central to the analysis, the same has not been true for histories of the French novel of this period. The chapter explores how women grappled with their outsider status and the different strategies which they adopted in order to legitimate their voices in an often hostile literary world. While drawing attention to similarities of both content and form in women’s novelistic practice, it also considers and illustrates the diversity of literary practices which characterises women’s writing of the period, and highlights the important ways in which gender shaped separate but interconnecting histories of male and female authorship of the nineteenth-century French novel.

The New Woman has a complex relationship with Decadence. For some critics, the Decadent movement is inherently misogynistic. In Daughters of Decadence (1993) Showalter argues that Decadence defines itself ‘against the feminine and biological creativity of women … In decadent writing, women are seen as bound to Nature and the material world because they are more physical than men, more body than spirit, they appear as objects of value only when they are aesthetised as corpses or phallicised as femme fatales’

The most powerful gender ideology in twentieth-century Korea was the ideal of the “wise mother, good wife” (hyŏnmo yangch’ŏ). This chapter examines the genealogy of hyŏnmo yangch’ŏ, demonstrating the diachronic, multivalent, and transcultural sources that contributed to it. The chapter specifically examines the dynamic interactions between the Korean tradition of womanly virtue (pudŏk) from the Chosŏn dynasty, Meiji Japan’s gender ideology (ryōsai kenbo), which gained prominence during the Japanese colonial era, and the Victorian notion of domesticity introduced by American Protestant missionaries. The chapter puts forward the argument that the prevailing notion of “wise mother, good wife” as the ideal for womanhood in Korea was a modern construct that grew out of these transcultural interactions. It was also an expedient framework that redefined domesticity in a way that was appropriate for the changing national and global milieu.

Marie Corelli wrote bestselling supernatural romances and detested the New Woman, while George Paston wrote realistic New Woman novels that cultivated a small, intellectual readership. Yet in the wake of the three-volume novel, both authors produced fiction about the writing life that makes the case for the codex book and the single-volume novel as bulwarks against the circular, self-contained system of other media—a system maintained by men. Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895) puts forward the bestselling novel as a means of direct, sanctified connection between celebrity author and adoring audience. Paston’s A Writer of Books (1898) looks to the future work, the novel unwritten, as a repository of truth and meaning. Together, they suggest that in the wake of the three-volume novel, the problem of the novel’s relationship to media systems could be approached as a problem of how and whether the novel mediates.