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Cover of New Woman Fiction, 1881–1899, Part I

New Woman Fiction, 1881–1899, Part I

Edited by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton

  • Published: 1 Jun 2010
  • DOI: 10.4324/9781851966417
  • Set ISBN: 9781851966417

Set Contents

Vernon Lee, Miss Brown (1884)


The labelling of Miss Brown as a New Woman novel is a recent phenomenon. When the field of New Woman studies emerged in the early 1990s, Miss Brown was not considered a relevant text. Indeed, in Ann Ardis’s classic study New Women, New Novels (1990), Miss Brown is absent from the bibliography. Some hope emerged for its inclusion when Elaine Showalter mentioned Miss Brown when discussing Vernon Lee in the introduction to Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (1993), a collection of short stories by New Women writers; but Showalter calls it ‘a satire of the aesthetic movement’ and not a New Woman novel. It was not until years later in Christa Zorn’s Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (2003) that a link between Lee’s novel and New Woman writing was made. There were likely two main reasons behind this lengthy delay. First, unlike most New Woman novels, Miss Brown had already been studied at length and categorized, so there was a place for it in traditional scholarship. Ever since the appearance of the September 1970 issue of Colby Library Quarterly – an issue devoted entirely to Lee, with an essay specifically on Miss Brown – the novel has been subjected to numerous examinations by scholars, with the conclusion that it is only a satire of aestheticism. The second reason has to do with Lee’s tenuous status as a New Woman, making it difficult for New Woman scholars to accept all of her works. Unlike Mona Caird and Sarah Grand, Lee was not aggressively feminist. As Patricia Pulham has remarked, ‘one may seek in vain for Lee’s name in most of the New Woman debates of the fin de siècle’.

Volume Contents

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    Front Matter
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    Introduction By Karen Yuen
  • Book I
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      Miss Brown. Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
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      Chapter VII
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      Chapter VIII
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      Chapter IX
  • Book II
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      Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
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      Chapter VII
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      Chapter VIII
  • Book III
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      Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
  • Book IV
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      Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
  • Book IV. (Continued)
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      Miss Brown. Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
  • Book V
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      Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
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      Chapter VII
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      Chapter VIII
  • Book VI
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      Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
  • Book VII
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      Chapter I
  • Book VII. (Continued)
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      Miss Brown. Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
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      Chapter VII
  • Book VIII
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      Chapter I
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      Chapter II
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      Chapter III
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      Chapter IV
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      Chapter V
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      Chapter VI
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      Chapter VII
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      Chapter VIII
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      Chapter IX
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      Chapter X
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      Chapter XI
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    Back Matter