Daughters of Decadence
Women Writers of the Fin De Siecle
Elaine Showalter (Edited by)
9780813520186
Paperback / softback, published 1 August 1993
352 pages
19.7 x 12.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.34 kg
At the turn of the century, short stories by -- and often about -- "New Women" flooded the pages English and American magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the Yellow Book. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form and courageous in its candid representations of female sexuality, marital discontent, and feminist protest, shocked Victorian critics, who denounced the authors as "literary degenerates" or "erotomaniacs." This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories from this period. The writers included in this highly readable volume are Kate Chopin, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Julia Constance Fletcher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand, Vernon Lee, Ada Leverson, Charlotte Mew, Olive Schreiner, Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Mabel E. Wotton. As Elaine Showalter shows in her introduction, the short fiction of the Fin-de-Siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorian women writers and the new era of feminist modernism.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
'An Egyptian Cigarette'
'Theodora: A Fragment'
'Suggestion'
'A Cross Line'
'She-Notes'
'By Accident'
'The Buddhist Priest's Wife'
'The Yellow Wallpaper'
'A White Night'
'The Fifth Edition'
'Miss Grief'
'Lady Tal'
'The Undefinable: A Fantasia'
'The Muse's Tragedy'
'Emancipation: A Life Fable'
'Three Dreams in a Desert'
'Life's Gifts'
'The Valley of Childish Things'
Biographical Notes
