The women”s sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day.
Both genres, with their shocking, `fast” heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper feminine” ideal to which nineteenth-century women and fictional heroines were supposed to aspire.
By exploring in impressive depth and breadth the material and discursive conditions in which these novels were produced,
The `Improper” Feminine draws attention to key gendered interrelationships within the literary and wider cultures of the mid-Victorian and fin-de-diècle periods.