New Woman Literature

Showing all 18 results

  • The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories

    In 1898, The Strand Magazine, one of the most influential publications of the Victorian fin de siècle, deemed best-selling author and editor L.T. Meade a…

  • Ann Veronica

    H.G. Wells’s 1909 novel centres on the coming of age of the spirited Ann Veronica, who runs away from her sheltered suburban home to live…

  • A Sunless Heart

    In A Sunless Heart, Edith Johnstone establishes a feverish atmosphere for her novel’s story of emotional and physical hardship and the power of bonds between…

  • The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social…

  • Reuben Sachs

    Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word,…

  • The Romance of a Shop

    The Romance of a Shop is an early “New Woman” novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own…

  • Mrs Warren’s Profession

    One of Bernard Shaw’s early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren’s Profession places the protagonist’s decision to become a prostitute in the context of the…

  • Moths

    First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere…

  • Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England

    During the British women’s suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote…

  • The Woman Who Did

    The controversial subject matter of Grant Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Did, made it a major bestseller in 1895. It tells the story of Herminia…

  • Selections from The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880-1907

    The Girl’s Own Paper, founded in 1880, both shaped and reflected tensions between traditional domestic ideologies of the period and New Woman values in the…

  • The Beetle

    The Beetle (1897) tells the story of a fantastical creature, “born of neither god nor man,” with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician…

  • The Story of a Modern Woman

    Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women’s weekly The Lady’s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself,…

  • The Type-Writer Girl

    Juliet Appleton is an officer’s daughter who is forced to make her own way in the world after her father’s death. Having been trained in…

  • The Story of an African Farm

    The Story of an African Farm (1883) marks an early appearance in fiction of Victorian society’s emerging New Woman. The novel follows the spiritual quests…

  • The Rebel of the Family

    The Rebel of the Family (1880) is the first New Woman novel by Eliza Lynn Linton. Perdita Winstanley, the novel’s protagonist, struggles to balance the…

  • The Clever Woman of the Family

    Charlotte Mary Yonge was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Though perhaps best known for her popular children’s books, she also…

  • A New Woman Reader

    In the 1890s one phrase above all stood as shorthand for the various controversies over gender that swirled throughout the period: “the New Woman.” In…