'Ann Heilmann's New Woman Fiction: Women Writing Feminism synthesies recent debates on the New Woman fiction, and makes its own distinctive contribution to the growing body of work on this fin de siecle phenomenon. It discusses a wider range of writers and texts than earlier studies of this body of writing, and locates both the writers and texts ... Read moremore clearly and more firmly in the context of late nineteenth 'feminism' than have earlier studies. It also seeks to draw parallels between this 'first wave' of feminism and the 'second wave' feminism of the latter part of the twentieth century. This has the effect of simultaneously broadening and narrowing the corpus of New Woman writing: more texts are put on display, but New Woman writers are more specifically (and perhaps more narrowly) defined as 'committed feminists with a vision of social regeneration through didactic literature [through which] they sought to reach and politicize a mass readership.' This lucid study offers anhistorically grounded and theoretically informed introduction to an important aspect of the history of women's writing.' - Lyn Pykett, Professor of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth Show Less