Mythologies Uplifted: The New Woman of the Margins

My essay troubles the “true fact” of the New Woman’s default whiteness, heteronormativity, and imperialism by returning to her roots in Irish literature and bringing Black women’s writing into this canon. Through an analysis of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins and Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, I argue for a retooling of the canon grounded in queer theory, Irish discourse, and Black feminism. Using Hortense Spillers’s concept of the counter-myth, I explore how Grand and Harper play with familiar narrative conventions—the mistaken identity plot and the tragic mulatta trope—to imagine queer, anti-imperial, and Black New Woman figures.