Emma Liggins

The British Short Story

Introduction: What is a Short Story?.- PART I.- Introducing the Victorian and Edwardian Short Story.- Victorian Sensations: Supernatural and Weird Tales.- New Woman Short Stories.- Imperial Adventures and Colonial Tales.- PART II.- Introducing the Twentieth-Century Short Story.- The Short Story and the Great War.- Experiment and Continuity: The Modernist Short Story.- The Short Story and Genre Fiction: The Strange Case of the Same Old, Same Old Story.- PART III.- 1945 and After: An Introduction to the Post-war Short Story.- Womens Stories, 1940s to the Present.- Multiculturalism and Relationships: The British Short Story Today.- Bibliography.

Writing against the “husband-fiend”: syphilis and male sexual vice in the new woman novel

Abstract This article explores the representation of conjugal sexuality and the impact of the spread of syphilis on sexual and marital relations in the 1880s and 1890s. Drawing on medical material on syphilis and media representations of the New Woman, it highlights womens increasing antipathy to the role of innocent wife offered to them by society. The author suggests that the New Woman fiction examines the power struggle between doctors and husbands for the control of the wifes body and sexual health, reflecting the contemporary debates about sexual infection and the deaths of syphilitic children. Syphilis constituted something of a taboo subject in fiction at this time, yet the New Woman plot, with its critique of married life and horror of male sexual vice, allowed women writers to register their disapproval of male behaviour within marriage and to voice through their heroines their anger at the medical and social treatment of diseased women. The author concentrates on womens changing attitudes to sexuality in Sarah Grands The Heavenly Twins (1893), Ella Hepworth Dixons The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Emma Brookes A Superfluous Woman (1894) and Menie Muriel Dowies Gallia (1895). Whilst New Woman heroines sought to ignore cultural pressures to channel all their energies into a happy family life, surviving outside marriage was still perceived to be too radical to be incorporated into fictional plots so that most New Woman novels still ended with the heroines death or her capitulation to the “Husband-Fiend”. As the novels explored womens fears of syphilitic infection, they also revealed the uncertain sexual identity of the New Woman and the difficulties of fictionalising alternative sexual lifestyles for women

George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture

George Gissings work reflects his observations of fin-de-siecle London life. Influenced by the French naturalist school, his realist representations of urban culture testify to the significance of the city for the development of new class and gender identities, particularly for women. Ligginss study, which considers standard texts such as The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World as well as lesser known short works, examines Gissings fiction in relation to the formation of these new identities, focusing specifically on debates about the working woman. From the 1880s onward, a new genre of urban fiction increasingly focused on work as a key aspect of the modern womans identity, elements of which were developed in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Showing his fascination with the working woman and her narrative potential, Gissing portrays women from a wide variety of occupations, ranging from factory girls, actresses, prostitutes, and shop girls to writers, teachers, clerks, and musicians. Liggins argues that by placing the working woman at the center of his narratives, rather than at the margins, Gissing made an important contribution to the development of urban fiction, which increasingly reflected current debates about womens presence in the city.

Odd Women? : spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction, 1850s-1930s

Introduction 1. Female redundancy, widowhood and the mid-Victorian heroine 2. Bachelor girls, mistresses and the New Woman heroine 3. Spinster heroines, aunts and widowed mothers, 1910-39 4. The misfit lesbian heroine of interwar fiction 5. Professional spinsters, older women and widowed heroines in the 1930s Conclusion Index

Her mercenary spirit: women, money and marriage in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1870s fiction

Abstract This article examines Mary Elizabeth Braddons lesser-known fiction of the 1870s in the light of discussions of women, money and marriage in the periodical press. It argues that in novels such as Milly Darrell (1871), Taken at the Flood (1874) and Dead Mens Shoes (1876) Braddon was acknowledging feminist debates about womens inadequate earnings and the problems of enforced idleness for married women, as well as reflecting the interests of the new consumer culture. In their exposure of a lack of a sphere of action for young women of limited education, these novels engaged with the woman question, yet they also tended to glorify the leisured lifestyle which “fast” women could achieve through flirtation and mercenary marriages. Braddons position within the literary marketplace is also considered, as she moved beyond the formulae of the sensation novel in the attempt to write more “serious” fiction. Her transgressive heroines can be perceived as “dangerous”, rather than disagreeable, as reviewers suggested, in their pursuit of wealth, revealing the modern womans need for money of her own to spend as she chooses.

An English governess in the Great War: the secret Brussels diary of Mary Thorp

and shaped the argument in the book, and lays the scaffolding of the intellectual arguments out for the reader to explore and critique. In this way, the chapter functions as a transparent but also intellectually generous exercise, and it would be really exciting to see more books adopt a similar approach. Overall, Olcott provides an excellent introduction to the IWY Mexico City conference, whilst also setting out the importance of the wider context and the longer institutional, political and intellectual legacies of the event, in a book that is precise, nuanced and engaging.

The “Sordid Story” of an Unwanted Child: Militancy, Motherhood and Abortion in Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women! and Way Stations

ABSTRACT This article reconsiders representations of the militant suffragette in two texts by the radical writer Elizabeth Robins: Votes for Women! (1907) and her collection of political speeches and articles, Way Stations (1913). Her plea for twentieth-century women writers to create new roles for women outside those of wives and sweethearts can be read in relation to the creation of her “exceptional” suffragette heroine, who thrives on her singleness in her 1907 play. Focusing particularly on the taboo issues of abortion and unmarried motherhood, the author considers the ways in which Robins developed the fallen woman on stage narrative in the early twentieth century, and how childlessness is shown to be both necessary and problematic for the suffragette heroine. The author also reassesses Robins’ complex commentaries on militancy and “quiet propaganda” in her suffrage speeches and pamphlets.

Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing

also pivotal to the development of literary modernism in general. The collection, however, has much to say about the versatility of Mansfield’s treatment of war throughout the wider body of her writing. As Kelly points out, “only ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and ‘The Fly’ are regularly anthologised” (4), and perhaps a reconsideration of Mansfield’s lesser-known war stories in the light of this context may pave the way for redefining the parameters of future anthologies of war fiction, as well as for further scholarship in the future.

THE “MODERN SPINSTER'S LOT” AND FEMALE SEXUALITY IN ELLA HEPWORTH DIXON'S ONE DOUBTFUL HOUR

This article sets out to contextualize Ella Hepworth Dixons production of short stories in relation to the womens magazines for which she wrote and what they had to say about the modern phenomenon of the spinster. The author argues that attitudes towards female sexuality, particularly in London Bohemian circles, were changing, though the decline of the chaperon and the relaxation of some rules around female sexual behaviour certainly did not mean that young women could be as liberated as they liked. Dixons work is also considered in relation to the growing popularity of the short story collection with New Woman themes at the turn of the century. Representations of female sexual behaviour and modern single women in “One Doubtful Hour”, “The Worlds Slow Stain” and “The Sweet o’ the Year” from her collection One Doubtful Hour and Other Side-Lights on the Feminine Temperament (1904) are examined in relation to other New Woman short stories of the 1890s and early 1900s.

Having a Good Time Single? The Bachelor Girl in 1890s New Woman Fiction

In an 1899 article for the Humanitarian, ‘Why Women Are Ceasing to Marry,’ Ella Hepworth Dixon defended the spinster from charges of unsexing and abnormality and validated the new freedoms and privileges of her social position. Claiming that the young girl of today has read her Doll’s House and is ‘firmly resolved … to refuse … to be any man’s “squirrel”’ (394), her view of the emancipation of women is anchored in ‘the amazing changes in the social life of women’ in recent years: The modern spinster’s lot [is] in many respects, an eminently attractive one. Formerly, girls married in order to gain their social liberty; now, they more often remain single to bring about that desirable consummation. If young and pleasing women are permitted by public opinion to go to college, to live alone, to travel, to have a profession, to belong to a club, to give parties, to read and discuss whatsoever seems good to them, and to go to theatres without masculine escort, they have most of the privileges — and several others thrown in — for which the girl of twenty or thirty years ago was ready to barter herself to the first suitor who offered himself and the shelter of his name. (394)