Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel

Abstract

With the rise of the militant suffrage movement, challenges to marriage and divorce laws and expanding opportunities for education and employment, the early years of the twentieth century constituted nothing less than a social revolution. Looking at a wide range of novels from this period, this book demonstrates how these changes rendered traditional fictional narratives based upon romance and marriage insufficient, and forced Edwardian novelists to develop innovative strategies to counter the limitations and ideological implications of those narratives. The original and provocative novels which resulted depict the experiences of modern women with unprecedented variety, specificity and frankness. In this scholarly text, Jane Eldridge Miller explores the intimate links between feminist challenges to traditional social organisation and artistic challenges to formal narrative conventions, and argues that, contrary to one of its key myths, modernism did not suddenly burst forth, but was part of the development that had its roots in the convergence of feminism and realism in the new fiction of the 1890s. This major re-evaluation of Edwardian fiction makes a significant contribution to literary critical theory.

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