[L]ate-Victorian readers had become accustomed to novels by women which were as much about the problems of being a woman writer as about the problems of women in society.

(Showalter 1985:viii)

I realised that in literature, everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was only one small plot left for her to tell; the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as man liked to imagine her—in a word to give herself away, as man had given himself in his writing.

(Egerton, quoted in Gawsworth 1932:58)

If women’s sensation novels had proclaimed themselves women’s texts by focusing on women’s sensations, adopting a woman-to-woman address and working within what was perceived to be a feminine genre, many New Woman novels situated themselves as women’s texts by making writing women and women’s writing their subjects. By foregrounding the figure of the woman writer, such novels foreground the problems of their own production. In addition, the woman writer, or more generally the woman artist (Caird’s Hadria, for example, is a musician), is repeatedly used as a way of figuring the lack of fit between women’s desire, the socially prescribed norms of the woman’s lot, and the actuality of women’s lives. In some New Woman fiction the writing or creative woman

-177-