Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 A 'Curious Political and Social Experiment' : A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Catherine Helen Spence presents the fictional lost colony as a utopian space for the radical feminist transformation of marriage and the state. Her settlers have intermarried with an indigenous group and reinvented marriage to include a probationary period of 'handfasting' where couples live as if married for a year and a day before deciding whether they wish to confirm their relationships more permanently with marriage. Though too early to be considered a 'New Woman' novel, Handfasted positions its brand of feminism with many of the discursive strategies that late nineteenth-century New Women novelists used, including the argument that women's rights and sexual freedom would help Anglo-Saxon women act as nation and empire builders. Greater Britain offers an important theoretical lens for the novel as a whole and for Spence's brand of feminism. Dilke's Greater Britain continues, saying that America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue.'

Source: Abstract.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Victorian Settler Narratives : Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature Tamara S. Wagner (editor), London : Routledge , 2011 24471337 2011 anthology criticism

    'This edited collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperalist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as "girl Crusoes" in works of fiction.'

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    London : Routledge , 2011
    pg. 207-220
Last amended 11 May 2022 16:10:41
207-220 A 'Curious Political and Social Experiment' : A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfastedsmall AustLit logo
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