New Woman Poetics and Revisionist Mythmaking in Fin-de-Siècle Periodicals

Abstract

This article considers how the female-authored poetry of The Yellow Book participates in a New Woman poetics that expands, reclaims, and celebrates women’s embodied experiences, both sexual and spiritual. Building on previous studies of this periodical’s gendered dynamics and aided by the research tools afforded by Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry  <https://dvpp.uvic.ca/>, this study situates poems by Rosamund Marriott Watson, Edith Nesbit, and Nora Hopper in relation to broader patterns of revising classical and biblical myth evident throughout fin-de-siècle poetry. Such an approach illuminates new constellations of meaning across periodical contexts and within The Yellow Book itself, inviting re-readings of lyric poems contributed by Olive Custance, Eva Gore-Booth, and others. As these examples underscore, revisionist mythmaking played a crucial role in the New Woman project of articulating more robust expressions of desire—as operative outside a patriarchal economy and as form of spiritual ecstasy that transgresses established categories of sacred/profane.