ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that women writers are haunted by the destructive nature of the writing process and the driving ambition to write. Yet when women write in New Woman fiction, they also gain access to mesmeric and ecstatic trance states, which ultimately leads to exceptional writing. The chapter discusses the connection between women, automaticity, and new technology to suggest that in New Woman fiction, technology allows women to adopt either passivity or authoritative agency in the writing process, in an examination of Grant Allens The Type-Writer Girl. A consideration of The Beth Book and A Writer of Books reveals that scenes of writing are figured in the supernatural terms of telepathy or automatic writing, in which authorship and agency are contested sites of power. The uncanny nature of this writing, in which the words seem to be both familiar, perilous and alien, since during the act of composition female protagonists court the unknown that exists beyond masculine definitions of selfhood.
