Feminism and Famine

Abstract

Recent scholarship has begun to read New Woman narratives within cross-national contexts (to use Boehmer’s term) and to consider the impact of contemporary colonial culture on this material, as I mentioned in the Introduction. For instance, postcolonial critics have underlined parallels between the rhetoric of empire-building in contemporary adventure fiction, which describes the enlarging of territory and the creation of a wider sphere for action, with that of New Woman texts that adopt the same strategies in order to enable women to break out of the private sphere.¹ This rhetorical construction of expanded horizons for women was a key strategy adopted by Sarah Grand,² who deployed the traditional attribution of moral authority and social conscience to women as a means to legitimize their authority in the public sphere. Reading this in a postcolonial framework, Grand’s tactics may be directly compared with the imperialist’s assumption of a civilizing role, or a fitness to rule, as justification for the colonizing impulse, as Jusová has demonstrated. However, Jusová’s categorization of Grand as an ‘imperialist feminist’ is not as unproblematic as it might at first appear; Grand’s complex and implicitly contradictory self-positioning in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Beth Book, demonstrates something of a more complicated relationship with imperialism, and with Ireland, her place of birth.