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Graff’s comparative analysis of Sarah Grand’s triumphant New Woman novels Ideala (1888) and The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Annesley Kenealy’s anti–New Woman novel A Water-Fly’s Wooing: A Drama in Black and White Marriages (1914) reveals that the “biopolitical” tropes they both use are notably similar. This raises questions about the viability of the boundary between feminist New Woman fiction on the one hand and antifeminist anti–New Woman fiction on the other. While the final chapter likewise reassesses the shifts in literary culture marking the chronological end of Victorian fiction by focusing on the last phase of the penny weekly newspaper the Dorothy Novelette, its focus on the periodical press also describes a narrative arc that leads us back to Hamilton’s and Moruzi’s essays. Kate Macdonald’s “Ignoring the New Woman: Ten Years of a Victorian Weekly Fiction Magazine” analyses the changing content and rocky history of a cheap family magazine that, despite its emphatically conservative outlook, printed often contradictory pieces and which moreover featured fiction by such different authors as Braddon and Edith Nesbit as well as John Strange Winter (Henrietta Stannard) and Netta Syrett.
To be able to assess the immense spectrum of popular fiction produced in an era Oliphant prophetically termed “the age of female novelists” (555) in her 1855 article on “Modern Novelists—Great and Small,” we need to do more than acknowledge the significance of such ambiguities or seeming incongruities. They ask us to explode any neat categories, and most importantly, to strive towards a discussion of literature unimpeded by variously defined dividing lines, including those between “the great and the small.” Canon formations and reformations will only stop looking like ideologically invested conspiracies when we read—and write about—once-forgotten authors without any sense of partisanship or apologia. Perhaps this can only be achieved in combination with a renewed engagement in recovery work in which oxidation is not just a feminist issue. The unearthing and detailed reading of the immense wealth of still undiscovered literary works needs to proceed without any specific lens in place.