British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930
Reclaiming Social Space
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The short story’s etymology begins, according to a bevy of critics, with its definition by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Twice-Told Tales’. In it, he asserted that the short stor...
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‘I will begin by saying, for the encouragement of would-be writers, that there never was a greater opening for short stories than at present, for magazines multiply nowadays faster than do good writers.’ So be...
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Victorian homes, like Victorian women, could earn reputations. The pervasiveness of Victorian ghost stories revolving around the haunted house point to the vulnerability of that location. In much of mid-Victor...
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In February 1913, Sydney was abuzz with excitement regarding ‘The Bush Girl’. A stage melodrama ‘entirely Australian [abounding] in sparkling incidents of bush life’, the play was packed with ‘picturesque scen...
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The labels of’ spinster’ and ‘old maid’, in Victorian rhetoric, indicated much more than years and marital status. To fail to marry was to be relegated to an almost-invisible social position, to face the trial...
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While the domestic interior became a site freighted with ideological meaning in the mid-Victorian period, it was not the only location wherein Victorians attempted to reclaim a rigidly-defined social space.1 Lond...
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We begin in a room. It is full of books and a writing desk and a brown ring on the carpet left by a hot kettle.1 This room in which Virginia Woolf works is nothing like the quarters occupied by her predecessors. ...