“A view of one’s own”: Writing Women’s Lives and the Early Short Stories

Abstract

Due to changes in the literary marketplace the 1890s witnessed a burgeoning of the short story genre. The collapse of the triple-decker novel in 1894, the waning of the circulating libraries and their powers of censorship, and a proliferation of periodicals helped to create this climate (Ledger 187). The advertising space available in the new periodicals meant that writers were relatively well paid for their short stories. For women writers, in particular, the genre was attractive: demands on time as well as relative ease of publication meant the fin-de-siècle periodicals were full of short stories by women (Bennett xiv). In addition, many women writers (George Egerton, Olive Schreiner, Kate Chopin, Vernon Lee, Ada Leverson to name only a few) saw the genre as releasing them from the conventional constraints of the novel. “The fragmentary and inconclusive nature of the short story made it the ideal vehicle for some of the most successful fictional explorations of modern women and feminism” (Miller, Jane Eldridge 24). Seen in opposition to the baggy, epic Victorian novel, the economy of the short story appealed to women writers concerned with the glimpse rather than the survey. Many New Women writers favored a “marginalized” genre to express their marginalized status as women.¹ The potential inconclusiveness of the genre added to its subversive possibilities. The use of allegory, dream, and fantasy in the stories of Egerton and Schreiner, for example, constitute an early modernism: their experimentation needs to be linked to Woolf’s own short story writing in the first decade of the twentieth century.²