George Paston’s Fin-de-Siècle Feminism: Caught Between a Book and a Hard Place

George Paston (Emily Morse Symonds) published six novels in the 1890s, all treating the highly topical ‘Woman question.’ But she is the least famous in the string of nineteenth-century female literary ‘Georges’ that includes George Eliot, George Sand, and George Egerton. Scrupulously even-handed, Paston’s novels were by turns overtly feminist and comfortingly conventional, an intricate balancing act that won her acclaim in her lifetime. Her ability to slip through the critical net has, however, led to her neglect by modern scholars. This chapter argues that the critical attention given to the obviously feminist A Writer of Books (1898) is symptomatic of a tendency to categorise writers, obscuring the nuances of women’s writing of the 1890s. Although one could describe Paston as a conservative with feminist leanings, or as a progressive who sometimes panders to propriety, it is more accurate to say that her works share commonalities with New Woman writing, domestic fiction, and sensation novels. The purpose of this chapter is not to rob Paston of her well-earned feminist credentials, but rather to demonstrate how the polarisation of the fin-de-siècle literary field produced ambivalent texts which deliberately thwarted the labels being imposed on them.