Cover -- THE 'IMPROPER' FEMININE: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introductory note -- Part I The 'Improper' Feminine -- 1 Gender and writing, writing and gender -- 2 The subject of Woman -- 3 The subject of Woman and the subject of women's fiction -- 4 Fiction and the feminine: a gendered critical discourse -- 5 Fiction, the feminine and the sensation novel -- 6 Representation and the feminine: engendering fiction in the 1890s -- Part II The Sentimental and Sensational Sixties: The Limits of the Proper Feminine -- 7 Historicising genre (1): the cultural moment of the woman's sensation novel -- 8 Surveillance and control: women, the family and the law -- 9 Spectating the Social Evil: fallen and other women -- 10 Reviewing the subject of women: the sensation novel and the 'Girl of the Period' -- 11 Historicising genre (2): sensation fiction, women's genres and popular narrative forms -- 12 Mary Elizabeth Braddon: the secret histories of women -- 13 Ellen Wood: secret skeletons in the family, and the spectacle of women's suffering -- Part III Breaking the Bounds: The Improper Feminine and the Fiction of the New Woman -- 14 The New Woman -- 15 The New Woman writing and some marriage questions -- 16 Writing difference differently -- 17 Feeling, motherhood and True Womanhood -- 18 Woman's 'affectability' and the literature of hysteria -- 19 Writing women: writing woman -- 20 New Woman: new writing -- Conclusion: reading out women's writing -- Notes -- Works referred to -- Index.