American Nervousness: Motherhood and ‘The Mental Activity of Women’ in the Era of Sexual Anarchy

This chapter revisits a site of foundational feminist scholarship to ask new questions about gender, class, race, health and motherhood. Examining two iconic fin-de-siècle female writers, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Gilman, it highlights an age-old tension in their work, articulated via contemporary eugenics, between the portrayal of the female body and that of the female intellect. It shows that both writers held antiquated views about female agency that sit uncomfortably with their common association with feminism and modernity.

Lily Montagu and Liberal Judaism

This chapter looks at the role of Judaism in late nineteenth-century culture, focussing on the life of Lily Montagu, whose importance lies in her activism and the unique way that she brought her faith (liberal Jewish) and her politics (socialist) into productive relationship. Montagu’s unorthodox career-path is traced and her social work and theology mapped in relation to larger debates about the Sabbath and sweated industries, at a time of heightened anxiety that Jewry was riven by a socialism in its midst. The chapter shows how models for female independence were in practice more varied than those represented in the press.

Intergenerational Collaboration and Conflict: Women’s Periodicals at the Fin de Siècle

This chapter examines conflicts between different generations of women in the late decades of the nineteenth century as played out in the popular press, including the burgeoning market for women’s magazines. It shows how print culture, including in new feminist magazines, constructed and then exploited divisions between the ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’, often for the purposes of advertising new products. It shows how at this time the modern woman was represented in the periodical press as a consumer and advertising commodity, as a sensationalist figure of controversy, as well as a symbol of the new age.

Theatre in the Provinces at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond Outcast London

This chapter examines the relationship between performance culture in two regional cities in the British Midlands—Nottingham and Birmingham—as compared to that in the metropolis, London. It compares reactions to plays by Ibsen and Pinero in these locales, providing evidence to suggest that regional audiences were knowledgeable about London culture, and that they were less shocked by avant-garde theatre than might be assumed.

The Irish Fin de Siècle

This chapter provides a survey of the range of cultural activity in Ireland during the late decades of the nineteenth century. It points to the importance of Irish writers in defining the Victorian fin de siècle, and the Irish backgrounds of many famous fin-de-siècle writers, especially women. Attention is given to specific forms of Irish writing, such as Land War fiction and experimental Irish drama and a distinct genre of Irish children’s fiction, as well as activities promoted by Irish revivalists, such as the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement, the Feis Coil Association and traditional Celtic games. Throughout this body of work, stress is placed regeneration and a looking to the future, rather than on degeneration and endings.

The Claims of Kinship: Humanitarian Ideals at the Century’s End

This Chapter examines the self-styled late nineteenth-century humanitarians and their formal organization, ‘The Humanitarian League’. It stresses the visionary zeal of the movement, and examines the wide range of topics discussed in the League’s two main journals, such as vegetarianism and vivisection, pointing up the tensions and paradoxes in humanitarian thinking at the time. It concludes by noting the holistic nature of the humanitarian vision and its echoes in later phenomena such as eco-criticism and the green movement.

Curious Intricacies: Some Versions of City Writing at the Fin de Siècle

This Chapter surveys the range of writing about the city, and particularly about London at the time. It explains why the metropolis became such an important subject for writers, as well as showing how it consistently eluded and challenged perception, except in partial or fragmentary ways. Attention is given to the variety of writing about the city, there being, it is argued, no single or dominant urban vision.

When a Bestselling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance: Collaboration, Networks and Theatre at the Fin de Siècle

This chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of the performance of a piece of avant-garde drama to highlights the prominent role of women in theatrical culture at the time, as both dramatists and actresses, and the professional opportunities that were then opening for them. It also shows the importance of a growing celebrity culture, and the complexity of the interactions between theatre, politics, religion, gender and theatrical production. It shows that even avant-garde theatre, concerned with such archetypal fin-de-siècle concerns as the occult and mysticism, were still deeply implicated in, and made possible by, a growing leisure industry.

Gothic Aesthetics

This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.

The Fin-de-Siècle Detective: ‘But My Job Don’t End There’

This chapter re-examines late nineteenth-century detective fiction. It challenges views of the genre as a conservative phenomenon that reassures its readers by exposing and then vanquishing threats to the social order. Through analysing a range of detective fiction, involving male and female detectives, it highlights the frailties of the specialist knowledge the detective processes, and how it is more often the case that the genre testifies to the inadequacy of professional knowledge to apprehend and control the world, pointing a persisting and threatening sense of violence and social chaos that eludes the detective’s grasp.