Read more
Laura Rotunno proves that there is still much to be said and learned about British New Woman fiction. Here, she successfully counters the established view of turn-of-the-century novels about “Girton Girls”— young women in higher education—as grim and gloomy portrayals of defeat by a sexist world. Her arguments throughout are persuasive and beautifully crafted, reframing these texts not merely as social history, but as boundary-breaking literary experiments that led the way out of Victorian methods of storytelling and toward modernism. Readers will appreciate her brilliant conclusion, too, with its direct link to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
—Margaret D. Stetz, Professor of Women’s Studies, University of Delaware, USA.
This book explores the representation of the first generations of women who studied at Oxford and Cambridge in popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Familiarly termed "Girton Girls", these women were depicted as intent on overthrowing the ancient universities and, by extension, English society. This study argues that the powerful and influential vision of the Oxbridge woman was both exploited and expanded in novels of the time. It shows that this fiction offers not only an informed critical view of this simultaneously anxiety ridden and intermittently hopeful period of English life between 1880 and 1914, but also reveals popular fiction's underexplored contribution to the move towards Modernist themes and literary techniques. The book posits that the Girton Girl was not simply a bit part in the sub-genre of the "university novel" or even within the confines of the New Woman fiction, but rather her character was rich and malleable enough to animate a variety of plots that respond to readers' burgeoning demands for the women who would inhabit their fiction.
Laura Rotunno is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State Altoona, USA. She has taught there since 2003 and received the Pennsylvania State University Teaching Fellow Award in 2014. She serves on the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Executive Board as well as the Advisory Board of the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE). In 2013, her Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture was published in the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series. Some of her work has also appeared in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Victorian Review.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction The New Woman Student in Fact and Fiction The Origin Story.- Chapter 2: The Wives Rewriting the Incompetent Belligerent Radical Wife Plot Or Stories Suspended in Sexuality.- Chapter 3: The Careerists Reenvisioning the Disreputable Harnessing Exaggeration and Alternating Between Extremes.- Chapter 4: The Educators Dispelling the Sunbeam Teacher Equivalency Or Exciting Advances and Dramatic Retreats.- Chapter 5: The Philanthropists and Activists No Revolutions Only Repetition without Resolution.- Chapter 6: Conclusion Girton Girl Fiction of 1880 to 1914 Reclaiming Narratives On Sufferance.
About the author
Laura Rotunno is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State Altoona, USA. She has taught there since 2003 and received the Pennsylvania State University Teaching Fellow Award in 2014. She serves on the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Executive Board as well as the Advisory Board of the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE). In 2013, her Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture was published in the Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series. Some of her work has also appeared in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Victorian Review.
Summary
This book explores the representation of the first generations of women who studied at Oxford and Cambridge in popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Familiarly termed "Girton Girls", these women were depicted as intent on overthrowing the ancient universities and, by extension, English society. This study argues that the powerful and influential vision of the Oxbridge woman was both exploited and expanded in novels of the time. It shows that this fiction offers not only an informed critical view of this simultaneously anxiety ridden and intermittently hopeful period of English life between 1880 and 1914, but also reveals popular fiction's underexplored contribution to the move towards Modernist themes and literary techniques. The book posits that the Girton Girl was not simply a bit part in the sub-genre of the "university novel" or even within the confines of the New Woman fiction, but rather her character was rich and malleable enough to animate a variety of plots that respond to readers' burgeoning demands for the women who would inhabit their fiction.
