"Not as Man Liked to Imagine Her": British Women Writers and the Birth of the Modern Short Story (1880-1910)

This project proposes to analyse the contribution made to the birth of the modern short story bywomen writers in Britain. Although the period under consideration (1880-1910) is a crucial one both forthe development of the modern short story and for the emergence of the first women’s movement, theinteraction of both developments has been rather neglected in literary studies: short story historiestend to focus on the modernist consolidation of fin-de-siècle experiments and histories of women’swriting tend to focus on the (New Woman) novel, which they consider from a predominantly thematicand contextual perspective. This project aims to fill this gap by studying the short stories by women writers in terms of form and subject matter, with special attention to the convergence between both. It is clear that women writers of the period eagerly turned to the new form, because they felt it liberated them from the constraints of plot and character of the Victorian novel and afforded greater freedom to express new female roles and identities. This interaction of a new form and a new content is what this project wants to investigate. It thus hopes to give the short stories by women writers (1880-1910) a more prominent place in literary history, specifically the history of the short story and the history of women’s writing. The corpus of this research project consists of the short fiction of seven women writers of the period, whose work was published in prestigious literary magazines and later assembled in short story collections. A close literary analysis of their work will be conducted against the theoretical background of women’s studies, gender studies, narrative theory and short story theory.nrpages: 300status: publishe