The New Woman in Fiction and Fact Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins . The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.

Foreword; L.Pykett List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: A.Richardson & C.Willis 'Nothing but Foolscap and Ink', Inventing the New Woman; T.Schaffer Bicycles and Blue Stockings: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption; C.Willis Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Women on the Move; S.Wintle Ibsen, the New Woman and the Actress; S.Ledger 'He-notes': Reconstructing Masculinity; G.Cunningham New Woman and the New Hellenism; A.Ardis Narrating the Hysteric: Fin de Siècle Medical Discourse and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins ; A.Heilmann Staging the 'Private Theatre': Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie; L.Marcus Scaping the Body: Of Cannibal Mothers and Colonial Landscapes; R.Stott Capturing the Idea: Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man; C.Burdett 'People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Heredity': Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism; A.Richardson The New Woman in Nowhere: Feminism and Utopianism at the Fin de Siècle; M.Beaumont The Next Generation: Stella Browne, the New Woman as Freewoman; L.A.Hall Women in British Aestheticism and the Decadence; R.Gagnier Index

ANGELIQUE RICHARDSON is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and science, and is currently working on a study of Hardy and science. She is the author of Love, Eugenics and the New Woman: Science, Fiction, Feminism and editor of Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914.

CHRIS WILLIS teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published a number of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular fiction, and co-edited Twelve Women Detectives, a collection of early crime stories.