Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
8 - Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
When you grow up, I think you will want to do something that only a few people can do well – paint a picture, write a book, act in the theatre, make music – it doesn't matter what; it if comes to you … just do it … And don't ask anybody if they think you can do it; they'll be sure to say no; and then you'll be disheartened. (Beth Caldwell's father addressing his daughter in Sarah Grand's The Beth Book)
In a recent attempt to categorize a distinctive genre of New Woman fiction and, in particular, to distinguish it from those fin-de-siècle novels (often written by men) which are merely about the New Woman, Ann Heilmann writes: “[I]n its most typical form, New Woman fiction is feminist fiction written by women, and deals with middle-class heroines who in some way re-enact autobiographical dilemmas faced by the writers themselves … [it is] a genre at the interface between auto/ biography, fiction and feminist propaganda.” In this chapter I shall explore the “feminism” of the New Woman fiction – a feminism so fraught with contradictions, and apparently so preoccupied with narratives of female failure, that it sometimes appears to be antifeminist – by examining the “interface”, in a number of nineties fictions by women, “between auto/biography, fiction and feminist propaganda,” or, to use terms which are probably more useful than the latter in this context, feminist debate and polemic.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , pp. 135 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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