Feminist fiction and fictional feminism: Sarah Grand and the new woman novel

This dissertation is a study of the novels of Sarah Grand (1854-1943), a British novelist and feminist activist. Between 1880 and 1920 changes in laws affecting women and in social and scientific beliefs about gender difference led Grand to deromanticize and politicize the most traditional form of the novel, the marriage plot. The first chapter provides an historical and cultural context for the study of the New Woman fiction. Later chapters explore Grand's interruptions of the marriage plot with narratives of female psychology and desire, with challenges to masculinist narrative authority, with multiple plots, with feminist reworkings of other traditional plots like the bildungsroman and the kunstlerroman, and with deliberate deviation from literary plots into social narratives from the worlds of medicine and eugenics.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio