New Women Writing Beyond the Novel: Short Stories

Abstract

The popular association between 1880s and 1890s British feminism and the novel as its chief literary expression has become an indelible and, it would seem, inevitable one. ‘Above all’, declares Talia Schaffer in Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2007), ‘the New Women novels were the first, most recognizable, and bestselling corpus of explicitly feminist literature’; thus they ‘deserve attention as an attempt to articulate women’s needs in a tumultuous time’. She makes this argument for the centrality of a genre outside the boundaries of her own anthology, even as she offers selections of significant journalism, poetry, and works of short fiction by and about New Women that are not, in fact, extracts from novels or works responding to novels of the period. Clearly, the linkage of turn-of-the-century feminist history and politics with a single literary genre has become so well established that it must be reaffirmed everywhere, even in volumes that offer evidence of important New Woman writing in alternative forms. Indeed, the words ‘New Woman’ sometimes have been absent where they might otherwise have been expected, if genres other than the novel are involved, as though these other types of literature have not quite earned their right to bear this label. Perhaps that is why, in 1993, Elaine Showalter explicitly described the contents of her Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle as ‘New Woman stories’ and their authors as ‘New Woman writers’, when composing the Introduction to this collection of short fiction, yet chose not to use the phrase ‘New Woman’ in the anthology’s title.