ABSTRACT
The laughing woman is the least remembered woman of the Victorian period. New Women writers are probably the least remembered authors of the Victorian period. Conservative male contemporaries may have feared the rebellious will of the New Woman and regarded her personally as so sinister and destructive a figure that she would have to be ridiculed into submission, if not physically clubbed. The British New Woman writer of the end of the century was forced into self-consciousness, therefore, about how she positioned herself on the issue of laughter. Much of the misogynistic comedy of the 1890s, however, was notable for its attacks not upon manners but upon what it labeled "woman's nature," which it blamed for eruptions as the New Woman's insurgent spirit. The potential of laughter, within the context of inequality, to do women more harm than good became the subject of one of her early short stories for the magazine Woman's World.
