Introduction

Gavin and Oulton introduce the third in their five-volume British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840–1940 series by identifying and contextualizing key aspects of women’s writing in the 1880s and the 1890s. The volume’s 16 original essays, written by international experts, critically reconsider 1880s and 1890s fiction by both canonical and lesser-known fin-de-siècle women writers, and the editors explain how the essays’ chronological ordering reveals continuities and change. Discussing qualities distinct to each decade, Gavin and Oulton show that female-authored texts of the 1880s are characterized by interest in work and education; the supernatural; and marriage, sex, and violence. In turn, women’s writing of the 1890s rewrote the terms of women’s spiritual and moral authority, and galvanised debates about topics including eugenics, the New Woman, and women’s access to politics and professional life in literature that was deeply self-conscious, historically inflected, and often experimental. Overall, the essays show that the final decades of the Victorian period are marked by both excitement and uncertainty.