The New Runaway-Woman Novelist

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the most overtly feminist genre explored in this study, fin-de-siècle New Woman fiction. Structurally, this chapter has the most in common with my first chapter on amatory fiction, in that it puts the personal biographies of some of the female authors who were most associated with the New Woman movement into conversation with the semi-autobiographical, runaway-woman künstlerromanae they chose to write. Focusing primarily on Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894), Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897), and George Egerton’s The Wheel of God (1898), this chapter brings the book’s discussion of the relationship between female authorship, female sexuality, and female rebellion full circle, with a final beat comparing Egerton’s lesser-known epistolary novel Rosa Amorosa: The Love-Letters of a Woman (1901) to Aphra Behn’s originary Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) with which my literary history began.