The (Irish) New Woman: Political, Literary, and Sexual Experiments

Abstract

The writing of Sarah Grand (Frances Bellenden Clarke McFall) (1854–1943) and George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) (1859–1945) animated the late-Victorian ‘New Woman’ polemic. Pioneering fiction by Grand (The Heavenly Twins) and Egerton (Keynotes) appeared in 1893, subverting normative nineteenth-century codes that sought to regulate the proper place of men and women in relation to class, gender, and nation. The following year, Grand’s landmark essay, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’ was responsible for bringing the term ‘New Woman’ into being. While the term ‘New Irishwoman’ is not a familiar one in the scholarship of the period, it is the label used by Irish poet Austin Clarke to describe George Egerton in his memoir A Penny in the Clouds. Its lack of currency reflects a general inattention in the scholarship to the distinctly Irish origins of many New Woman writers. This essay addresses that lacuna by foregrounding the New Irishwoman and her cultural output. Illuminating the vital interaction of New Woman writing and Irish political culture in the period, it will contend that the revolutionary context in Ireland in the period between the Land Wars and partition (c.1880–1922) was key to the discursive nexus that produced the literary New Woman.