New Woman

The ideal of the British New Woman, variously representing feminist, activist, fashion reformer, and writer, has been the subject of renewed critical interest since the late twentieth century. Although symptomatic of its situation in the fin de siècle, which “names those things that were never quite assimilated into the high-Victorian moment,” since the 1980s the New Woman has transcended its polemical Victorian conceptualization to represent “prequels to modernism as well as sequels to Victorianism.” As Sally Ledger has argued, the New Woman, despite being largely a “discursive phenomenon,” was nonetheless historically significant and central to late Victorian literary culture.