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The New Zealand New Woman: Translating a British Cultural Figure to a Colonial Context
Author(s) -
Hallum KirbyJane
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12149
Subject(s) - colonialism , scholarship , context (archaeology) , criticism , harmony (color) , history , situated , literature , literary criticism , sociology , aesthetics , art , law , visual arts , archaeology , political science , artificial intelligence , computer science
While New Woman scholarship has been a lively element of Victorian studies for the last 30 years, less attention has been given to the colonial space and the pressure it puts on the New Woman in the way in which her freedoms differed from that of her British counterpart. This essay for the Global Circulation Project begins to interrogate how the historical moment of the New Woman movement translates to a New Zealand context in the fiction of three turn‐of‐the‐century New Zealand writers: Julius Vogel (1835–1899), Louisa Alice Baker (1856–1926) and Edith Searle Grossmann (1863–1931). The state of criticism on each of these writers has tended to focus on their productive engagement with New Zealand cultural history rather their being situated within a New Woman literary tradition. Ranging from the late 1880s through to 1910, their writing shows a progression from a utopian vision of harmony between Britain and the colonies, to a refutation of the intellectual and cultural limitations of the colonial setting and, finally, to a rejection of Britain in favour of a distinctly New Zealand home. The three novels under analysis here are judged to be examples of New Zealand New Woman fiction and are recuperated within a wider framework of late 19th‐century New Woman writing.