‘New Woman’
A phrase said to have been coined by Sarah Grand in 1894 in the North American Review to
describe a new generation of women, influenced by J. S. Mill and other campaigners for
women's rights, who believed in Women's Suffrage, abolition of the double standard in sexual
matters, Rational Dress, educational opportunities for women, etc. New Women appear in the
works of Ibsen, G. B. Shaw, Wells, O. Schreiner, Rebecca West, Gissing, G. Allen, and G.
Egerton, among many others.
Source:
Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble, p. 697. Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Fiction written by women [is] by no means a recent phenomenon. Prolific producers of
“Gothic” novels in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women had continued to
scribble away throughout the Victorian age, with George Eliot famously damning the writers of
popular romantic fiction in her article, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”.[Westminster Review,
1856, reprinted in Thomas Pinney (Ed.) Essays of George Eliot, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1963] Novelists of stature, such as Eliot herself, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell,
had been taken seriously by the literary establishment in the nineteenth century; the backlash
began only when fiction written by, about and for women seemed to begin to take
cultural precedence over almost all other forms of writing. A major aspect of the New
Woman fiction’s novelty at the fin de siècle was its visibility. Promoted by pioneers of the so-
called New Journalism such as W. T. Stead, women writers such as Sarah Grand, Olive
Schreiner, George Egerton and Mona Caird began to dominate the literary scene in the final
years of the nineteenth century.
It is only during the last 20 years that the female New Woman writers have been recognised
by literary critics. Ground-breaking studies by Gail Cunningham and Elaine Showalter have
been followed by important books on the subject by Ann Ardis, Gerd Bjorhovde, Lyn Pykett
and Jane Eldridge Miller amongst others.1 Canonically, it has been the male producers of
novels responding to the “New Woman” phenomenon who have been favoured: Thomas
Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing and even George Moore have until recently been given
a good deal more critical attention than their literary sisters. All that has changed, and as we
approach our own fin de siècle the archaeological work of feminist criticism has successfully
brought many female writers of the late-Victorian and Edwardian years back into critical focus,
and a number of New Woman novels by women are now back in print.
Source:
Sally Ledger, Introduction to Women’s Writing 3.3 (Special Number: Women’s Writing at the
Fin de Siècle; 1996)
1
Gail Cunningham (1978) The New Woman in the Victorian Novel (London: Macmillan);
Elaine Showalter (1978) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to
Lessing (London: Virago); Ann Ardis (1990) New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early
Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press); Gerd Bjorhovde (1987) Rebellious
Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the Novel, 1880-1920 (Oslo: Norwegian
University Press); Lyn Pykett (1992) The Improper Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel
and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge); Jane Eldridge Miller (1994) Rebellious
Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel (London: Virago).
