scholarly journals ‘An Adventuress I Would Be’: Originality in Miss Cayley’s Adventures in The Strand Magazine.

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-122
Author(s):  
Mercedes Sheldon
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Grant Allen ◽  
Detective Genre ◽  
Negative Connotation

When read straight through as a novel, Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1898-99) appears to reside singularly within the detective genre; this reading limits our understanding of the ways in which Grant Allen challenges the anxieties regarding gender held by the contemporary, conservative readership of The Strand Magazine (1891-1950). Allen integrates multiple popular genres into the short story serial, including the detective stories which frame the narrative, as well as cycling romance, mountaineering, typist, and travel stories. Gordon Browne’s illustrations underscore Allen’s manoeuvres, visually inviting the reader to trust the protagonist and by extension to accept her “artless adventures.” I contend that, when read within its original, illustrated periodical context, Miss Cayley’s Adventures does not present the magazine’s readership with a New Woman detective but rather with a female adventurer, an adventuress. The letterpress and illustrations rely on and subvert the negative connotation of the word, using it as a critical means to interrogate the New Woman trope and to show the middle classes an original way to view womanhood.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

THE MAN WHO WROTE A NEW WOMAN NOVEL: GRANT ALLEN'STHE WOMAN WHO DIDAND THE GENDERING OF NEW WOMAN AUTHORSHIP

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Vanessa Warne ◽  
Colette Colligan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Grant Allen

IN1895,GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVELentitledThe Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton'sKeynotes(1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman.The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

Reading Failure in(to) Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Lady Jeune's “New Woman” Essays, 1885–1900

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Type I ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Jude The Obscure

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

scholarly journals Collapsing the Courtship Plot

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-40
Author(s):  
Anne-Marie Beller
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Woman's Sphere ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Improved Model

The New Woman writing of the 1890s grappled with the legacy of mid-nineteenth century constructions of romance and gender ideology. In their bid to promote a new vision of heterosexual relations between the sexes, New Woman writers often explicitly engaged with earlier ideals of Separate Spheres and the “Angel in the House.” The short story provided an ideal form for exploring these issues, freeing writers from the generic conventions of the traditional three-volume novel. This article examines the ways in which three women writers of the 1890s attempted to rewrite the script of mid-Victorian courtship through the short story genre. In different, but related ways, Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room,” Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s “One Doubtful Hour” all offer a challenge to the doctrine of separate spheres. Yet, while each of these texts critique what they present as outmoded views of woman’s sphere and nature, they also articulate the difficulties experienced by both genders in imagining an evolved and improved model of sexual relations. These short stories represent the collapse in New Woman fiction of the traditional “courtship plot” through a failure to re-imagine and re-map the mid-Victorian gender ideology they seek to dismantle.

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