The New Woman is simply the woman of to-day striving to shake off old shackles, and the immense mass of ‘revolting’ literature cannot have grown out of nothing, or continue to flourish upon mere curiosity.

(Stutfield 1897:115)

The 1890s was…a period in which a number of women writers, dealing as feminists with the social and sexual rights of women, secured a prominence which at times developed into sensation… They helped to wrench English fiction into new channels.

(Rubinstein 1986:24)

The twin questions ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘What does a woman want?’, and the plethora of answers they provoked, were even more troubling and pervasive in the culture of the 1890s than they had been in the 1860s. They were given a new focus in the figure of the New Woman, one of the most widely and loudly discussed subjects in the public prints of the mid-nineties. (The year 1894 seems to have been the New Woman’s annus mirabilis.) Who or what was this creature who so powerfully seized the public imagination, and who was analysed, reviled, caricatured and parodied in fiction and in the words and images of newspapers and magazines? First and foremost the New Woman was a representation. She was a construct, ‘a condensed symbol of disorder and rebellion’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1985:247) who was actively produced and reproduced in the

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