The New Woman

Fiction and Feminism at the Fin De Siecle
By comparing the fictional representations with the lived experience of the "New Woman" of late-Victorian Britain, this text contributes to the undertanding of the "Woman question" at the the turn of the century and the consequences of a socio-sexual inhertitance for 20th century New Women writers.
Sexually transgressive, politically astute and determined to claim educational and employment rights equal to those enjoyed by men, the new woman took centre stage in the cultural landscape of late-Victorian Britain. By comparing the fictional representations with the lived experience of the new woman, Ledger's book makes a major contribution to an understanding of the 'woman question' at the fin de siecle. She alights on such disparate figures as Eleanor Marx, Gertrude Dix, Dracula, Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner and Radclyffe Hall. Focusing mainly on the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the book's later chapters project forward into the twentieth century, considering the relationship between new woman fiction and early modernism as well as the socio-sexual inheritance of the 'second generation' new woman writers.