Overview

This exploration into the development of women's self-defence from 1850 to 1914 features major writers, including H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh, and encompasses an unusually wide-ranging number of subjects from hatpin crimes to the development of martial arts for women.

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9780230300316

Table of Contents

Reviews

Femininity, Crime and Self-Defense is a superb addition to New Woman studies and a potential rich resource for scholars in late-Victorian and Edwardian literary scholarship. - Lena Wanggren, University of Edinburgh, UK Opening up new areas for research in the fields of women's history, but also detective fiction and urban studies, this book's major contribution to Victorian and Edwardian studies is in unsettling the reader's perceptions, insisting that we look again at what we think we already know. - Carolyn Oulton, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

'Emelyne Godfrey's Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes is a fascinating historical and literary read, which considers Wells' Ann Veronica from an innovative angle, that of martial arts and women's sports.' -Dr Emma V. Miller, HG Wells Society 'Adroitly addressing the challenging topic of women's self-defence during the long Victorian period via examples ranging from H.G. Wells' Ann Veronica to the martial arts training of the Suffragettes, Emelyne Godfrey's book is recommended as a worthy companion volume to her 'Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence'.' - Tony Wolf, The Bartitsu Forum 'Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes offers new ways of reading literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, through the prism of violence and self-defence. Godfrey pays close attention to women's history, from the fashion for ornamental daggers and the rise of physical exercise for women to the increasingly urgent calls for female suffrage, to ask wider question about the construction of gender and the culturally coded relations between the sexes. In charting the shifts in gender construction and its literary refractions during these years, she examines both male and female authored texts to interrogate the cultural codification of sexuality, chivalry and the gentleman. The book offers convincing arguments about female narrators / characters' experience of space and travel, with a detailed analysis of entrapment or imprisonment in workhouses, derelict Gothic buildings and brothels informing discussions of train travel and the sometimes fraught relations between young women and working class drivers or servant 'protectors'...Opening up new areas for research in the fields of women's history, but also detective fiction and urban studies, this book's major contribution to Victorian / Edwardian studies is in unsettling the reader's perceptions, insisting that we look again at what we think we already know.' - Dr Carolyn Oulton, Department of English and Language Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

'Emelyne Godfrey's Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes is a fascinating historical and literary read, which considers Wells' Ann Veronica from an innovative angle, that of martial arts and women's sports.' -Dr Emma V. Miller, HG Wells Society 'Adroitly addressing the challenging topic of women's self-defence during the long Victorian period via examples ranging from H.G. Wells' Ann Veronica to the martial arts training of the Suffragettes, Emelyne Godfrey's book is recommended as a worthy companion volume to her 'Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence'.' - Tony Wolf, The Bartitsu Forum

Author Information

EMELYNE GODFREY graduated with a Ph.D. in English from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. A freelance writer and researcher, she writes academic articles, dictionary and encyclopaedia entries and poetry, and gives lectures to societies. She is a regular contributor to History Today and is the Publicity Officer for the H.G. Wells Society.

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