Review by Choice Review
Youngkin (California State Univ., Dominguez Hills) argues that a late-Victorian "feminist realist aesthetic" influenced the narrative techniques of modernist fiction. She writes that both novelists and book reviewers (the latter courtesy of the late-19th-century feminist journals Shafts and The Woman's Herald) developed a three-pronged model of women's agency: "consciousness," "spoken word," and "concrete action." Of the corresponding techniques used to represent such agency, the author finds the development of the woman's "perspective" to be most significant. Youngkin devotes a chapter to each "prong," in the process analyzing Mona Caird, Menie Dowie, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, George Moore, and Henrietta Stannard. In the final chapter she argues that Moore's feminist contemporaries received his Esther Waters (1894) as an exemplary work of feminist realism, but ignored Stannard's A Blameless Woman (1894) because of its conventional romance tropes. The conclusion traces feminist realism's influence on more avant-garde modernist practices. Although Youngkin's refusal to treat women writers as "more feminist" than men is salutary, and her recovery of the book reviews helpful, the project's more ambitious claims for the feminist realist aesthetic require far more archival work. Specialists will appreciate the book's interpretations of some underread authors. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. M. E. Burstein SUNY College at Brockport
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
