Abstract

With the rise of the militant suffrage movement, challenges to marriage and divorce laws and expanding opportunities for education and employment, the early years of the twentieth century constituted nothing less than a social revolution. Looking at a wide range of novels from this period, this book demonstrates how these changes rendered traditional fictional narratives based upon romance and marriage insufficient, and forced Edwardian novelists to develop innovative strategies to counter the limitations and ideological implications of those narratives. The original and provocative novels which resulted depict the experiences of modern women with unprecedented variety, specificity and frankness.