Catching up with the Victorians in The Caravaners and The Enchanted April

Intense preoccupation with the intersection of gender, class codes and critical interiority is a notable feature of early twentieth-century literary culture. But it was already visible in the proto-New Woman writing that emerged as a new and distinct approach in the 1880s, gaining traction as it entered mainstream and popular culture by the 1890s. These novels, plays and stories, often written by women themselves to explore their own experience and protest against social conditions, constitute an important stage in pre-First World War feminism. Victorian debates about what it means to be a woman continue to inflect writing by twentieth-century authors...