Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered
Editors: Carolyn W de la L Oulton and SueAnn Schatz
Gender and Genre
978 1 85196 651 6: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
978 1 85196 656 1
Mary Cholmondeley was one of the best-selling ‘New Woman’ writers of the late nineteenth century, yet her perceived reluctance to engage directly with political and feminist issues has meant that she has also been one of the most overlooked. This important new collection of essays challenges that critical misconception, revisiting her work and examining the ways in which her writing subtly explored the principles of social change. Cholmondeley’s novels voiced the ideas of a new feminist agenda, developing the concept of the ‘New Man’ alongside that of the ‘New Woman’ and deeply questioning the nature of female sexuality within a male-dominated society. This book provides a necessary critical reappraisal of one of the most challenging and subversive of nineteenth-century women writers.
Whilst the bulk of writing on Mary Cholmondeley has focused on her most famous novel, Red Pottage, these essays cover a wide range of her works including short fiction and longer texts that have previously received little or no critical attention. This is the first time that a collection of essays on Cholmondeley has been drawn together within one book, and represents the rekindling of academic interest in a writer whose significant position within late Victorian and early Modernist writing is only now beginning to be recognized by scholars and critics of the field.
Sample pages
Readership
Literature, Victorian Studies, Feminism and Gothic Writing
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Defining Women/Defining Men
1 ‘Social Suicide – Yes’: Sensational Legacies in Diana Tempest – Tamara Wagner
2 How to be a Feminist Without Saying So: The New Woman and the New Man in Red Pottage – SueAnn Schatz
3 ‘The Bad Women are Better than the Good Ones’: The New Woman and Sexual Fall in the Short Fiction – Carolyn W de la L Oulton
4 Writing Women: Narration and Literary Culture in the Short Fiction – Christine Bayles Kortsch
5 Cholmondeley's Fables of Identity – Benedetta Bini
Part II: Creating Identities
6 Negotiating the Terms of Celebrity Culture: Cholmondeley’s Prefaces – Linda H Peterson
7 ‘I Know that to be Untrue’: Belief and Reality in the Short Fiction – Jennifer M Stolpa Flatt
8 Revising the Gothic: The Spiritual Female in 'The Ghost of a Chance' and 'The End of the Dream' – Karen Yuen
9 Guiding Spirit: Stella Benson's Aunt Mary – Marlene Baldwin Davis
Part III: Past, Present, Future
10 Naturalized Imperialism in The Danvers Jewels: Reworking The Moonstone – Patricia Murphy
11 ‘Moth and Rust’: Cholmondeley’s Assessment of the Church of England – Brenda Ayres
12 Dreams of Futurity in 'Votes for Men' and ‘The Dark Cottage’ – Kirsty Bunting
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