‘She would write… in invisible ink’: An Introduction

Abstract

Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle, as its title suggests, is a project based on duality and ambivalence. As women are ideologically constructed through language, so late nineteenth-century female authors in turn rewrote and contested images of womanhood — angel in the house, spinster, harpy — that were culturally presented to them in literature, the press, and within their own homes. This volume therefore considers both women who write and how they in turn rewrite or rein-scribe female experience at the fin de siècle. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the early 1900s, ‘Woman’ was obsessively scrutinized and discussed as both subject and author of literature that itself often focused on the subversive nature of feminine authorship — she is repeatedly figured ‘watching us watching her watching us watching her.’ While a number of women writers actively engaged with this debate on feminine social roles, others reverse the terms of the debate by rewriting male plot lines in their novels and stories. In challenging norms of masculinity, they obliquely contest the shaping of a female experience dominated by male expectations.