Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
12 - Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
Was the novelist Mary Ward a purveyor of outmoded ideas about womanhood? That was the widespread perception reflected in a cartoon on the cover of Votes for Women in July 1914. The cartoon's headline announces, “Time to Shut up Shop.” Beneath these words appears a dress shop whose name we read backwards through the window: “Mrs. Humphrey [sic] Ward – Modiste.” The lady representing Mary Ward wears a ruffled, presumably hooped skirt, representing Victorian styles; displayed behind her are a nearly identical dress, several enormous bonnets, and a cage-like set of skirt hoops. The harsh-featured Ward figure shows a large, beribboned bonnet to a pretty woman dressed in a slim-profile dress representing the latest style. The caption below reads:
woman of to-day: “Surely you don't expect me to put up with any of these!” mrs. humphry ward: “I am sorry we have nothing newer. This style of thing gave every satisfaction – fifty years ago.”
The message is clear: Ward's ideas about women are as outdated as fifty-year-old fashions.
The woman who inspired this caricature was by 1914 nearly as well known for leading the National Anti-Suffrage League as for writing novels. Upon publication, six months later, of Delia Blanchflower, her novel about the suffrage movement, most critics – like critics today – readily labeled the politics of the book and its author “anti-suffrage.”
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- Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , pp. 204 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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