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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