The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in 19th-century scholarship. Bringing together the latest research by leading international critics and cultural historians and new, controversial young scholars, it explores the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.