Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle Authors of Change

Concentrating on a period of significant social and political change and exploring both canonical and newly rediscovered texts, this book critically assess the changing culture of the late-Victorian period as represented by a range of women writers through a range of essays by leading academics in the field and cutting-edge work by newer scholars.

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Foreword; L.H.Peterson 'She would Write…in Invisible Ink': An Introduction; A.E.Gavin & C.W. de la L.Oulton PART I: POETICS AND AESTHETICS Re-Viewing Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle : Recent Critical Trends; L.Pykett Sons of Fire and A Lost Eden: Expectations of Narrative and Protocols of Reading in Mary Braddon's Fin-de-Siècle Fiction; G.Malcolm 'The Method of Life we all Lead': Olive Schreiner's Short Fiction as Challenge to the Stage Method; S.Eggermont 'Let Your Life on Earth Be Life Indeed': Aestheticism and Secularism in Mathilde Blind's The Prophecy of St. Oran and 'On a Torso of Cupid'; S.Lyons Editing Michael Field: Taking Fin-de-Siècle Women's Poetry to a Broader Audience; M.Thain & A.P.Vadillo PART II: DOMESTICITY AND DEVIANCE 'I am Not by Nature Domestic': Mary Cholmondeley and the Politics of Home; C.W. de la L.Oulton Having a Good Time Single?: The Bachelor Girl in 1890s New Woman Fiction; E.Liggins Fin-de-Siècle Female Biographers and the Reconsideration of Popular Women Writers; J.Atkinson 'I have Expiated my Sins to you at Last': Motherhood in Victoria Cross's Colonial Fiction; M.Purdue 'C. L. Pirkis (not 'Miss')': Public Women, Private Lives, and the Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective; A.E.Gavin III: GENDER AND THE BODY The Seventh Wave of Humanity: Hysteria and Moral Evolution in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins; N.Hetherington 'A Queer Sort of Interest': Vernon Lee's Homoerotic Allusion to John Singer Sargent and John Addington Symonds; C.Maxwell Under the Hill: The 'Man Question' in the New Woman Novels of Marie Corelli, Jessie Fothergill, and Mary Linskill; B.Ayres 'Your Loving is Unlike Any Other': Romance and the Disabled Body in the Gothic Fiction of Edith Nesbit and Lucas Malet; K.A.Miller Athletic Bodies Narrated: New Women in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction; T.J.R.Collins Index

JULIETTE ATKINSON British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London, UK BRENDA AYRES Professor and Assistant Honors Director, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA TRACY J. R. COLLINS Assistant Professor, Central Michigan University, USA STEPHANIE EGGERMONT Junior Researcher, Leuven Centre for Irish Studies, Belgium NAOMI HETHERINGTON Birkbeck, University of London, UK EMMA LIGGINS Lecturer in English Literature, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK SARA LYONS Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. GABRIELLE MALCOLM Independent Scholar, UK CATHERINE MAXWELL Professor of Victorian Literature, Queen Mary, University of London, UK KATHLEEN A. MILLER Ph.D. Candidate, University of Delaware, USA lLINDA H. PETERSON Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English, Yale University, USA MELISSA PURDUE Assistant Professor, Minnesota State University-Mankato, USA LYN PYKETT Emeritus Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, UK MARION THAIN Senior Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham, UK ABA PAREJO VADILLO Birkbeck College, University of London, UK