The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Si[grave{e}]cle.(Review)

The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Si[grave{e}]cle, by Sally Ledger; pp. vii + 216. Manchester University Press, 1997, [pounds]35.00, [pounds]12.99 paper, $59.95, $19.95 paper.

Posthumously, the New Woman owes quite a debt to Sally Ledger. First, with Scott McCracken, she co-edited an anthology that enlivens the study of New Woman texts, Cultural Politics at the Fin de Si[grave{e}]cle (1995). Now her own The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Si[grave{e}]cle offers the first full-scale investigation of the topic since Ann Ardis's New Women/New Novels (1990). This study locates the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and political pamphlets preoccupied with the New Woman at a bustling turn-of-the-century crossroads of socialism, imperialism, decadence, lesbianism, urbanity, and mass culture.

In The History of Sexuality (1976) Foucault argues that as emerging discourses define and thereby limit human belief and behavior, these dominant discourses inadvertently call reverse discourses into being. Unfortunately, reverse discourse binds adversaries to the very constructs they resist. Ledger takes this …