Tomboys in Sarah Grand’s New Woman Fiction

Abstract Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897) and Babs the Impossible (1901) both feature overtly tomboyish protagonists, in what I argue is an effort to shift notions of femininity and gender identity and to adopt gender-neutral qualities as features of the New Woman – qualities such as independence, comradeship, and loyalty to other human beings. In this essay, I argue that Grand attempted to soften resistance to the New Woman by focusing on tomboyism in childhood (utilizing people’s tendency to feel favourably towards children) and then extending tomboy qualities to New Womanhood while providing the Victorian public with an exemplar of independent and robust femininity. The critical difference between a prototypical tomboy figure and the one in New Woman fiction is that the latter keeps their tomboyism after maturity, sublimating the trait into her inborn self, faithful to herself and her ideas. Beyond the trope of the childhood tomboy, Grand aimed to bolster and strengthen womanhood by adopting tomboyism as an extension of a inborn self and redefine notions of acceptable female behaviour, thereby expanding the scope of womanhood.