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THE MAN WHO WROTE A NEW WOMAN NOVEL: GRANT ALLEN'S THE WOMAN WHO DID AND THE GENDERING OF NEW WOMAN AUTHORSHIP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2005

Vanessa Warne  and
Colette Colligan
Vanessa Warne
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
Colette Colligan
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Extract

IN 1895, GRANT ALLEN PUBLISHED A NEW WOMAN NOVEL entitled The Woman Who Did. This treatise-like novel appeared as part of the Keynotes Series, a group of ideologically progressive texts published by John Lane for Bodley Head in the 1890s. As Margaret Diane Stetz writes, Lane made this series “a haven for ‘New Woman’ fiction, naturalistic short stories, and ‘decadent’ poetry and art” (72). Marketed as status and sex objects (81), many of the thirty-three novels and short-story collections that make up the series concern themselves with New Woman issues such as marriage and female sexuality. Lane had taken the name for this series from George Egerton's Keynotes (1893), a collection of short stories told from the perspective of an emancipated woman. The Woman Who Did, published two years later, also featured a New Woman and became the most notorious book of the series. Combining a free-love, anti-marriage message with a tragic plot, Allen's novel focuses on a clergyman's daughter, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry the father of her child, Alan Merrick, on feminist principles. Unwilling to enter an institution that she compares to “vile slavery” (43), she chooses to live unmarried with her lover and daughter until his death. She withstands the calumny of family and friends and years of grieving and penury only to discover in the end that her daughter rejects her feminism and views her illegitimacy not as the “supreme privilege” her mother believed it to be, but rather as a “curse” (132). In a way typical of New Woman novels, the story ends with the heroine's suicide.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 21 - 46
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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