This chapter locates a new cultural anxiety in the late nineteenth century about the woman who under-identifies, that is, refuses or is simply incapable of a feminine standard of emotional identification with literature. The expression of this anxiety, in New Woman novels of the fin de siècle and George Gissing’s New Grub Street and The Odd Women, reveals the ways in which identification can both reinforce and subvert gender categories. In these novels, and in sources ranging from proceedings of the British Medical Association to humor magazines, Victorian commentators blamed women’s apparent detachment from literary identification on the professionalization of their reading, and attributed its symptoms to a kind of sickness or blighted fertility. Women’s emotional disinvestment from literature was depicted as not merely wayward but pathological. More than a century of overt crises about the management of female identification culminated in the fear that women might not emotionally identify with literature at all, validating the book’s larger argument that irrational identification had come to define femininity itself.

Critics have often recognized George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) for its rich treatment of late-Victorian authorship and publishing. Moreover, it is particularly notable for its self-consciousness about the social and cultural determinants of its own production as a three-volume novel and a work in print. This chapter argues that the novel’s bracing and disenchanted account of print culture emerges from the prospect of a media ecology in which print becomes just another -graphy. In this world of mediated distraction and disposability, print’s material dimensions would become intrusively noticeable, even as different formats tweak the affordances of print to target different readerships. The vision of print among other media haunts New Grub Street, but it was fully embraced by George Newnes’s wildly successful Tit-Bits, the real-life journal that (as “Chit-Chat”) inspires the novel’s most cutting satire of mass publishing.