This five-volume series, British Womens Writing From Brontė to Bloomsbury, 18401940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in womens fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British womens writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of womens authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined.
Volume 3: 1880s and 1890s analyses confluences and developments in womens writing across two fin-de-sičcle decades. Its 16 original essays reconsider fiction by canonical and lesser-known women writers, redefining the landscape of female authorship during these decades. By exploring womens fiction within the social and cultural contexts of the 1880s and 1890s, the collection distils in terms of womens writing how these decades discretely build on earlier work that is identifiably Victorian. The last two decades of the century, in distinctive ways, witnessed literary experiment, reflection on the limits of realism, and a fruitful sense of confusion about what was ending and what was about to begin.
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Womens Writing of the 1880s.
Chapter
2: Edith Simcox on George Eliot: Transgendered Portraits in Episodes in the
Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers.
Chapter 3: Domestic Metaphors and
Scientific Illustration: Frances Power Cobbe and the Anti-Vivisection
Movement in the 1880s.
Chapter 4: A ghost indeed: Spectralising the Female
Householder in Margaret Oliphants 1880s Fiction.
Chapter 5: Between the
Aesthete and the Shopworker: Mind And Labour In Vernon Lee And Amy Levy.-
Chapter 6: Writing for the Masses: Ouida and Newspaper Syndication.
Chapter
7: Adopting the Next Generation: Parenting in Womens Writing of the 1880s.-
Chapter 8: Spelt from Sibyls Leaves: Anna Kingsfords Dreams and
Dream-Stories (1888).
Chapter 9: We are one: Fellowship Ideals and Social
Transformation in Mona Cairds The Wing of Azrael.- Part II: Womens Writing
of the 1890s.
Chapter 10: Notable or Invisible? Reassessing Women Writersof
the 1890s.
Chapter 11: Exploring Womens Possibilities at the Fin de Sičcle:
Sarah Grands Quest for Womens Enlightenment.
Chapter 12: New Humour, New
Dialogue: Ada Leversons Contributions to Punch and The Yellow Book.
Chapter
13: George Pastons Fin-de-Sičcle Feminism: Caught Between a Book and a Hard
Place.
Chapter 14: A good deal of risk...and a chance of danger:
Detection, Adventure, and Violence in Beatrice Heron-Maxwells The
Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker.
Chapter 15: Woman Hate, Disgust, and
National Happiness in the 1890s: Marie Corellis The Sorrows of Satan.-
Chapter 16: [ S]uch a nasty, sneering book: Class, Gender, and Ellen
Thorneycroft Fowlers Concerning Isabel Carnaby.
Chapter 17: Womens Quest
for Independence in the 1890s: Mary Cholmondeleys Diana Tempest and Red
Pottage.
Adrienne E. Gavin is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Co-founder and Honorary Director of the International Centre for Victorian Woman Writers (ICVWW), Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. She also teaches at Massey University, New Zealand.
Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton is Professor of Victorian Literature and Co-founder and Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers (ICVWW) at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.
