Possessing London: The Yellow Book’s Women Writers

Abstract

While the domestic interior became a site freighted with ideological meaning in the mid-Victorian period, it was not the only location wherein Victorians attempted to reclaim a rigidly-defined social space.¹ Londoners also attempted to make sense of the urban world that surrounded them. In the fin de siècle city, the jumble of the street and the uncontrollable mix and crush of people became of paramount importance to those who inhabited it. Urban spaces were socially constituted not simply through literal location, but through the actors that moved through those sites, both displaying themselves and looking at others. Pierre Bourdieu explains that social reality is an ensemble of invisible relations between perceptions, actions, and social structures which we call classes.² This chapter focuses on the way in which Bourdieu’s triumvirate of interactions is represented through women’s fiction in this moment of social fluidity. George Egerton, Charlotte Mew, and Evelyn Sharp — three notable women writers of the avant-garde periodical Yellow Book — bear witness to the dramatic shifts in gender identities occurring in late nineteenth-century London. Their fictive representations of men failing to define women and women, conversely, redefining themselves in the spaces of the city are facilitated by the form of the short story.