The New Girl: Girls' Culture in England, 1880-1915.

The past decade has seen rising scholarly interest in the turn-of-the-century New Woman. Recent studies generally concentrate on books like Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895), the books that inspired Margaret Oliphant to label their authors "The Anti-Marriage League" and Hugh Stutfield to call their characters "erotomaniacs." Some cultural historians mention the "bicycle craze" or cite the articles about "The Revolt of the Daughters" in the Nineteenth Century (January to March 1894), but then devote their attention to the revolt by wives and mothers and its literary manifestations, overlooking the New Woman's unmarried younger sister. Sally Mitchell's important study redresses this imbalance and shows just how significant and interesting the "new girl" was. The seemingly narrow topic turns out to have broad implications: the book should interest anyone studying popular culture, gender, children's literature, or the history of women, …