![]() Prefaced with a geographical account of colonial India and Canada, the author goes on to study masculinities and out-of-place Britishness in these places which have growing railway networks.ĭespotopoulou also casts a critical eye over Rhoda Broughton, Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant’s female protagonists. She takes a long-awaited critical reading of Flora Annie Steel in chapter three, ‘Breaching National Borders: Rail Travel in Europe and Empire,’ comparing her to Rudyard Kipling in terms of writing style. Despotopoulou’s examination of understudied mid-century female writers is particularly enlightening. Despotopoulou’s analysis is largely literary – she cites George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) as a fictional example of a sexual liaison on a railway which is consensual but morally dubious on both sides. These troublesome and complex representations are of course manifested in the literature of the period. Despotopoulou exposes the argument that women were incompatible with the increasing modernising era because of their biology. Despotopoulou highlights the charges of rape which took place in the latter part of the century, which were fetishized in the anonymously published pornographic text Rape on The Railway (1984).( 3) Before the innovation of corridors between carriages, the train compartment was a site of threat which lasted for the duration of the journey.įurther alienating women from the exciting promises of the railway – chiefly the licence to travel widely and quickly – the author criticises the discourse which still sentimentally associated women with a pre-industrialised idyll. Moreover, the railway was an environment for incidents of sexual violence. Victorian women’s lack of engineering knowledge, combined with their obligation to uphold societal morality on-board, limited their scope for power in the railway context, confirming it as a male realm. Despototpoulou writes in chapter one, ‘Geographies of Fear in the Age of Sensation’, that women were ‘rendered vulnerable by a presumed ineptitude’ (18). The male skilled workforce involved in rail transportation in the burgeoning industrial era meant that women were largely excluded from the employment opportunities brought by the railway. ![]() Although there are arguments to define the train carriage as a kind of non-space (Marc Augé has suggested that the hotel or the supermarket for instance fit into this category), in the nineteenth century existing gender relations had to be defined in an entirely new space in a context which evoked the public and the private two categories whose contradistinction was upheld by Victorian society.( 2) The author suggests that the railway was a space to consolidate gender roles as well as challenge the separate spheres and expose the fallibility of such distinctions. As a newly invented mode of transport (mechanised rail transport systems first appeared in England in the 1820s) men, women, and their relation to the industrial system were being continually redefined. Building on seminal studies on the Victorian public’s relationship with the railway such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey (1977) and Michael Freeman’s Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999), and more recent studies such as Wendy Parkins’s Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s – 1930s (2009), Despotopoulou’s book provides a much-needed focus on the gender relations inherent in the experience of working and being a passenger on the railway. Yet as Anna Despotopoulou highlights, railway travel for women was not always such a liberating experience.ĭespotopoulou’s book presents a multi-faceted view of women’s experience on railways. Wells’s eponymous heroine Ann Veronica epitomises the feminist fin-de-siècle ![]() This brief description encapsulates a micro history of women’s social conduct on the railway in various ways H. ‘She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified her grandmother beyond measure she sat with her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving in.’( 1) Reviewed by Lois Burke, Edinburgh Napier University ![]() Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
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