Ann Heilmann

Hystorical fictions: Women (re)writing and (re)reading history

ORBIDDEN histories are the only stories worth reading, or so Oscar Wilde might have phrased it. But what is it about history that suggests the secret or forbidden, and why should contemporary women authors display such eagerness to rewrite it? The closing decades of the twentieth century and first years of the new millennium have seen a growing trend towards historical fiction in women’s writing; Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Tracy Chevalier, Margaret Forster, Valerie Martin, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, Katie Roiphe, Adhaf Soueif, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and many others not discussed in this special issue have made history and their characters’ personal and political engagements with, entanglements in, and possessive desires of the past a central F w A N N H E I L M A N N A N D M A R K L L E W E L L Y N .......................................................................................................

Mona Caird (1854-1932): wild woman, new woman, and early radical feminist critic of marriage and motherhood

This paper, which makes available previously unknown pictures and personal information drawn from interviews, introduces aspects of the life and work of a neglected First Wave feminist writer. In particular, it examines Cairds analysis of the social construction of marriage and motherhood and the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships. The conceptual framework within which Caird wrote, while being embedded in its historical context, bears striking resemblance to some theories within Second Wave thought, especially those of Carol Gilligan and Adrienne Rich. The paper addresses the problem of how to negotiate the danger of ahistoricism when establishing ideological and conceptual links between feminists of different historical periods, and argues for regarding Caird as a radical feminist in the making.

Mrs grundy's rebellion: margaret oliphant between orthodoxy and the new woman

Known for her strong opinions on Thomas Hardys writings and her condemnation of what she dubbed the “Anti-Marriage League” among turn-of-the-century writers, Margaret Oliphant seems more of a reincarnation of Mrs Grundy than a hesitant womens advocate. Yet although she came down on the side of establishment morality, some of her later nineteenth-century newspaper articles and especially her fiction, with its strong central female characters, challenge Victorian sex-role stereotypes and suggest that Oliphant occupied an ambiguous, fluid position. Exceptional for women of her time in terms of her earning power and phenomenal writing output, Oliphant was unusual, too, in that she maintained, single-handedly, a steady string of children, relatives and male adults. In her ambivalent and shifting position on womens rights she could be seen as a representative of the older generation of “respectable” Victorian middle-class women who, as a result of personal experience, became more sympathetic to some of the aims of the womens movement as the century came to a close, while clinging to the strict moral code of an earlier age and remaining firmly opposed to the sexual liberalism of the fin de siecle.

Visionary desires: theosophy, auto-eroticism, and the seventh-wave artist in Sarah Grand's "The Beth book"

The tide was coming in. The water ... was ... bright dark sapphire blue, with crisp white crests to the waves, which were merry and tumbled. It was the sea for an active, not for a meditative mood; its voice called to play, rather than to that prayer of the whole being which comes of the contemplation of its calmness; it exhilarated instead of soothing, and made her joyous .... She stood long on the rocks by the water’s edge, retreating as the tide advanced, watching wave after wave curve and hollow itself and break, and curve and hollow itself and break again. The sweet sea-breeze sang in her ears, and braced her with its freshness, while the continuous sound of wind and water went from her consciousness and came again with the ebb and flow of her thoughts. But the strength and swirl of the water, its tireless force, its incessant voices ... invited her, fascinated her, filled her with longing—longing to trust herself to the waves, to lie still and let them rock her, to be borne out by them a little way and brought back again, passive yet in ecstatic enjoyment of the dreamy motion. Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (324–25)

Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians

Hybridity is . . . the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority). . . . [T]he colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory . . . a negative transparency. If discriminatory effects enable the authorities to keep an eye on them, their proliferating difference evades that eye . . . Those discriminated against may be instantly recognized, but they also force a recognition of the immediacy and articulacy of authority – a disturbing effect that is familiar in the repeated hesitancy afflicting the colonialist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated subjects: the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots. . . . [Hybridity] reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion[.]

The Haunting of Henry James: Jealous Ghosts, Affinities, and The Others

In recent years scholarship on Henry James has been enriched by the influence the ‘master’ of the turn-of-the-century ‘Art of Fiction’ has exerted specifically on the neo-Victorian imagination. As Cora Kaplan (2007, p. 65) has noted, the genre of biofiction has had particular resonance: Emma Tennant’s Felony (2002), Colm Toibin’s The Master (2004), and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004) all invest in what John Freedman (1998, p. 1) has called ‘the moment of Henry James’ (and Lodge more recently conceptualized as ‘The Year of Henry James’)1 in order to retrace, recreate, and refract the multiple personae of a writer whose experimentation with issues of authorship, identity, and subjectivity reflects central literary and critical preoccupations of the turn of the millennium. This essay examines four different instances of the creative adaptation not of ‘the author’ James himself but of his most influential, ‘authoritative’, novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898): in the medium of the gothic tale (Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly’, 1994), the litcrit campus thriller (A. N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost, 2005), the neo-Victorian lesbian gothic (Sarah Waters’s Affinity, 1999), and supernatural film (Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others, 2001). Each text adds another ‘turn’ to James’s exploration of the imagination’s ability to shape reality, and in so doing engages with Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘hyperreal’: the intense psychological authenticity simulacra assume in the mind.

A Past of Her Own: History and the Modernist Woman Writer

The articles collected in this special issue were originally all delivered as papers at the ‘Hystorical Fictions: Women, History and Authorship’ conference we organised at the University of Wales, Swansea, in August 2003. When we began planning the event – writing the call for papers; contacting academics we thought might be interested in attending – we anticipated that, given the recent prominence of ‘historical fiction’ by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and others, a large number of speakers would want to focus on contemporary women writers’ uses of history. What proved most interesting, however, was the way in which this trend of, to use Adrienne Rich’s term, feminist ‘re-visioning’,1 viewed by so many critics and readers as part of a postmodern literary culture, has its roots in the modernism of the early twentieth century. The modernist movement is generally viewed as holding the twin imperatives of moving into the future while addressing the continued presence of the past and of tradition. T. S. Eliot, who built his quintessentially modernist text The Waste Land on the foundations of the traditional literary canon, declared in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that for the male artist and poet ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously ... His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’.2 History and literary tradition are thus the cornerstones of high modernism. Yet while the relationship of male modernist writers like Eliot, Joyce and Yeats with history and (literary) tradition has been the subject of much critical discussion,3 and although seminal feminist work of the last two decades has established the significance of

The “New Woman” Fiction and Fin‐de‐Sièck Feminism

This paper deals with a popular fin-de-sieck genre which reflected and fictionalized contemporary debates on the New Woman. In reclaiming the much-berated notion of propaganda literature, I argue that in its most typical form New Woman fiction was a female-authored and feminist genre. It was produced by and for women, and proved immensely successful as a means of promoting and popularizing the main concerns of the nineteeth-century womens movement. In defining the characteristics of the genre, I discuss the marked differences between feminist and anti-feminist writing of the fin de siecle. While ant-ifeminist works tended to be aesthetically one-dimensional, feminists wrote at the intersection of a number of textual traditions, such as the social document, the political pamphlet, auto/biography, and fiction. Male writers who concerned themselves with the New Woman colonized the genre in order to attack feminism and to explore misogynist sexual fantasies; femal anti-feminist novels were riddled with contradictions which reveal the ideological inconsistencies in their writers’ lives. Neither group produced definitive New Woman fiction which was a committed feminist genre.

Masquerade, sisterhood and the dilemma of the feminist as artist and woman in late nineteenth‐century British women's writing

Fin-de-siecle feminist writers solved the dilemma of having to “defy the cultural definition of artist or woman if [they were] to remain artist[s] and wom[e]n” (Stewart, 1979, p. 14) by braving patriarchal notions of submissive femininity and male‐engendered art in their own artistic lives, and by re‐asserting their feminist beliefs in the personae of their protagonists. As women intending to create rather than be created by male society, their heroines sought to overcome gender boundaries, either by masquerading as men, or by replacing heterosexual power structures with the idea of an all‐female community. Both cross‐dressing and sisterhood necessitated an abnegation of (hetero)sexuality.

Writing Barry – Writing Gender/Genre Crossing: An Introduction

This opening chapter introduces the reader to the historical figure of James Barry and to the key concepts of the book: transgender, neo-Victorianism, life-writing/biographilia (biography, biofiction, biodrama). This chapter is divided into three sections: 1. (Self-)Representations: Gender, Genre and Transgression considers the self-referential ambiguity that the historical subject Barry embraced and that is reflected in biographilic approaches in order to argue, as the key premise of the book, that the gender instability of James Barry serves as an exemplary illustration of the genre instability of biographilia. 2. Meta/Textual Impersonations: Neo-Victorian Biographilia provides a conceptualization of current life-writing theories that will form the framework of the study. 3. The final section, on ‘Passing Reflections and Structures’, provides a chapter overview.