Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel

by Patricia Stubbs

Women and Fiction is a wide-ranging and controversial discussion of the relation of literary images of women to social reality at the turn of the twentieth century. At a time of feminist militancy and formal iconoclasm in the arts, the moral imperatives of Victorian domestic and sexual ideology were giving way to those of a new era as the move towards female emancipation gained strength. How far is this reflected in literature of the time.
Starting with an account of the interrelation of women, sexual ideology and censorship in the nineteenth century, Patricia Stubbs considers how novelists of the period challenged - or failed to - assumptions about women in society. She focuses on Hardy, Moore, James, Gissing, Wells, Bennett, Forster and Virginia Woolf, but also surveys the work of less famous writers, feminist and non-feminist - Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, Mrs Humphry Ward, Eliza Lynn Linton and others.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction

263 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1979

Reviews

[Niamh Dyson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for Literature module but didn't give me too much info that was relevant for what I needed, also a little waffley for my taste haha