The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900

Bilston, Sarah

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272617.001.0001

Cited by 27 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Divorce and property laws were changing in many countries, a powerful Queen was on the British throne, and barriers to women's education, employment and legal recognition were gradually being dismantled -at least for some (usually white) middleclass women. It was also what Sarah Bilston (2004) has dubbed 'the awkward age' in fiction for women and girls, where the increasing number of female authors struggled to balance representation of womanhood or nation-building with ideas of gender rebellion, independence and creativity -and indeed their own lived experience. The ideal child of earlier didactic tracts gave way to more complex, and sometimes much naughtier, girls (Foster & Simons 1995:7).…”

Section: The New Girlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tomboys: Performing gender in popular fiction

Gardiner

2021

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In the nineteenth century, new characters exploded onto the pages of popular novels: forthright, self-reliant and self-aware girls who became known as tomboys. Like Jo March storming through the pages of Little women, these brave and boisterous young women charmed and astonished readers, and profoundly influenced generations of girls. This article examines the impact of the tomboy in literature, its confluence with other, older, archetypes such as the cross-dressing warrior maid, and its development alongside other proto-feminist heroines of the nineteenth century: the Female Gentleman and the Plucky Girl. The article interrogates not only the character traits of fictional tomboys, but also the narrative arcs and tropes with which they were often associated, such as the Tamed Tomboy, who, like Jo March, comes to learn the real meaning of womanhood, as defined through her mother and sisters, in marriage; and the Incorrigible Tomboy, like George in the Famous five books, who resists all efforts to be treated "like a girl". The article further explores the continued relevance of these famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century tomboys, whose performances of gender and sexuality echo in recent fiction for children and young adults through characters such as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger games trilogy, the genderfluid Micah in Justine Larbelestier's Liar, or overtly queer heroines such as Kaede in Malinda Lo's Huntress. What has the tomboy in literature meant to twenty-first century understandings of gender performativity? And, importantly, what stories about gender - what possible lives - do these characters construct for the young women who read them?

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Section: The New Girlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tomboys: Performing gender in popular fiction

Gardiner

2021

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“…24 Sarah Bilston even asserts that in much of the 'socially conservative Victorian discourse', with which the 1914 generation had been raised, 'womanhood was produced by marriage; "woman" almost necessarily meant "married woman"': 'a young girl attained adult status suddenly, almost instantaneously, through the performative "I do" of the marriage vow.' 25 The sociological and psychological implications of aligning the attainment of womanhood with matrimony troubled Bowen throughout her writing life. The potentially interminable state of girlhood that it created was a topic she explored frequently through the maladjusted adolescents who populate her fiction, as well as in essays for as wide-ranging publications as Vogue, Leader and Punch magazines.…”

Section: Elizabeth Bowen's a World Of Love Opens At Daybreak On A Hot...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unlived Lives, Imaginary Widowhood and Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love

Bryan¹

2020

The Review of English Studies

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This article reads Elizabeth Bowen’s 1955 novel A World of Love as exploring the legacy of certain highly imaginative coping mechanisms that were adopted by women in response to wartime losses. Acknowledging how Bowen’s mid-century works exhibit a curious return to the lot of those who came of age amidst the demographic imbalances that followed the Great War, it suggests that A World of Love interrogates the psychological draw of ‘imaginary widowhood’: a form of counterfactual self-fashioning that saw many single women of Bowen’s generation elect to view themselves not as spinsters, but as those who would have been married were it not for the conflict. Noting parallels between the novel’s depiction of a girl whose sexuality is awakened by the letters of a long-dead soldier from the Great War and the various forms of appropriation that were encouraged around the body of the Unknown Warrior—including the 1918 literary hoax The Love of an Unknown Soldier: Love Letters Found in a Trench—the article offers a new account of A World of Love as a text which registers the ambivalent and creatively rich qualities of a psychological climate that was at work throughout the twentieth century. Bowen’s novel, it argues, is propelled by a profound interest in the forces which induced successive generations of British women to forge intimate counterfactual relationships with those lives rendered unliveable, and the loves that were denied them, on account of world war.

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“…9 More recently, Sarah Bilston has argued for the increased awareness of the 'awkward age' in women's popular fiction after 1850. 10 Such differences in scholarly opinion focus mainly on the nineteenth century. Representations of young women tend to converge from the fin de siècle onward.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%