Women and the Railway, 1850-1915

Examines cultural representations of women’s experience of the railway in the nineteenth century
Examining the representation of women in the spaces of the railway in literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book explores the extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities that the train offered women. An emblem of the conquest of national and imperial space and of the staggering advances of science and technology, the train gave women a taste of its omnipotence, eventually becoming a space of emancipation, transgression, and fear for women. The book brings together the sensation, mystery, realist, and early modernist railway narratives by female and male authors, analysing women’s trajectories within and beyond the city and the nation, as urban passengers, travellers, tourists, and colonists. In texts by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Ward, Flora Annie Steel, and Mona Caird as well as Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, the ambiguous space of the railway highlights the artificiality of the private/public divide, while giving rise to woman’s impulse to traverse boundaries, not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. In the novels, short stories in periodicals, news items and commentaries, essays, illustrations, and paintings examined, trains become contact zones of multiple encounters, battlefields of gender, class, and imperial ideology.
Key features
The first full-length examination of texts by and about women which explore the railway as a gendered space within a British, European and Imperial context
Explores a variety of cultural discourses which deal with women and the railway: fiction, poetry, news stories and commentaries, essays, paintings and illustrations
Concentrates on many understudied writers of the nineteenth century
Includes 9 images to help illustrate the study

Anna Despotopoulou is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century English fiction.