LeeAnne M. Richardson's New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire illuminates the interconnected discourses of gender and imperialism in the last decades of the nineteenth century by deconstructing the opposition between the liberal, feminist interests of New Woman novels and the masculine, authoritarian foundations of colonial adventure fiction. Exploring the convergence of these two subgenres around late-century gender debates, Richardson argues, on the one hand, that New Woman novels adapted the language of adventure fiction to narrate women's increasing freedom within and from the domestic sphere and, on the other, that colonial adventure fiction shaped itself in reaction to the emerging feminist movement. The book's five chapters integrate readings of canonical texts (Heart of Darkness [1902], Dracula [1897]) with less familiar works (Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters [1896], H. Rider Haggard's Mr. Meeson's Will [1888]) to problematize the binarisms associated with and dividing these subgenres: colonizer versus colonized, adventure versus domesticity, native versus nonnative. Combining formalist readings with cultural studies of the late Victorian period, Richardson's work ultimately demonstrates that debates over women's status were crucial in the coproduction of two subgenres that spearheaded the novel's emergence from the marriage plot.

Richardson begins her study with an engaging examination of the emergence of New Woman novels and colonial adventure fiction from earlier categories of realism and romance. After reviewing general similarities between New Woman and adventure fiction, the first chapter argues that women's appropriation of naturalistic writing, previously associated with virility, caused a counterreactionary elevation of romance, whose male heroes became representatives of a rejuvenated national spirit. “Anxieties about the supposed effeminacy of naturalism and the danger it posed to British masculinity engendered ambitious conceptions of the cultural work to be performed by the romance novel,” Richardson argues. “From the proper mode for boys, romance becomes the proper genre for men” (28). Despite a somewhat formulaic opening, this initial chapter offers revealing insights into the gender debates underlying the formation of adventure fiction.

The book's argument is strongest when it is able to sustain a tightly woven examination of the dialogue between New Woman and adventure novels. Exemplary is the latter half of the discussion of On the Face of the Waters, a novel about an Englishwoman's experiences in India during the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. Richardson argues that Steel's use of adventure tropes questions the violence and racial hierarchies conventional to adventure fiction, on the one hand, and, on the other, demonstrates the personal and political efficacy of the heroine's growing respect for Indian culture. “The New Woman's adventure is to find empowerment not by stepping on but by walking with the other. … By extending the ideology of feminism to the empire, Steel suggests, a community of women can join together to re-imagine colonial relations and to redistribute power” (103). The conclusion is somewhat idealistic, especially in light of Steel's reductive view of east-west philosophical dichotomies, but Richardson's reading is skillful in tracing the interwoven discourses of feminism and imperialism. Also effective is her treatment of Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894), which Richardson reads as a critique of the romantic ideology that imagines women as objects of possession by paternalistic caregivers and male lovers. Indeed, chapter 5's discussion of the New Woman novel as a critique of romance is one of the book's strongest parts, tying back neatly to the opening examination of romanticism's role in the development of adventure fiction.

The weaker parts of Richardson's book lie in her readings of adventure fiction, which are generally less incisive than her work with New Woman texts. Here, she tends to overlook finer distinctions between representatives of this subgenre, thereby limiting her own argument. She goes to pains to vindicate Steel from accusations of racism, for example, arguing that the author's “perspective is realistic rather than racist” (89) in depicting the violence of relations between British men and their Indian subjects. The same circumspection, however, is not given to her reading of Heart of Darkness, which she allies with Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines in promoting an imperialistic discourse that attempts to stereotype the racial other and thus negate individual subjectivities. While Richardson is careful to distinguish Steel's narrative voice from the opinions of her characters, the same distinction is not made in her discussion of Marlow, whose thoughts seem to be read as representative of Conrad’s. The systematic treatment of adventure novels closes off certain possibilities for interpretation that would challenge the presumed limits of the genre. Not mentioned, for instance, is the possibility that Heart of Darkness is as much a criticism of imperialist discourse as it is a promoter of it. The same problem of an inflexible interpretive framework emerges in Richardson's reading of Dracula, where the assumption of Stoker's interest in defusing the New Woman's powers produces a tangled net of associations that is less indicative of its “creator's ideologically riven relationship to the gender trouble of the late century” (55) than of Richardson's overeagerness to prove the novel's antifeminist agenda.

While I commend this book for its fresh insights into the relationship between New Woman and colonial adventure fiction and also appreciate its reinvigoration of several understudied texts, I am disturbed by the imbalance in the treatment of these two subgenres. Equally disturbing is Richardson's tendency toward redundancy: there is an irking overuse of the terms “engender” and “colonize,” symptomatic of stagnancy in some parts of the argument. Summaries of the New Woman's historical significance at the beginnings of the first three chapters are also redundant, covering terrain more creatively handled by previous critics. For readers unfamiliar with late Victorian debates about gender, these summaries may prove informative, but others will be tempted to skip to the more innovative parts of the book.