The Victorian fin de siècle was, as Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst note, an epoch marked by the collision between old and new, the Victorian and the Modern (2000: xiii). Max Nordau comments in Degeneration (1892, English translation 1895) on the immense changes that had swept through Western Europe with the industrialisation of society and its effects on humanity:

Arguably, never before had such great social and political changes, coupled with advances in technology and new cultural movements, happened in such a short period of time.

In literary culture, Raymond Williams classified the years from 1880 to 1914 as an ‘interregnum’, claiming that rather than doing ‘anything very new’, the artists and writers of the period represented ‘a working-out, rather, of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection’ (1963: 165). However, more recently the late nineteenth century has come to be considered not merely as an ‘age of transition’ between Victorian and modernist eras, but as a literary and cultural period in itself (Keating 1989: 1). As Lyn Pykett notes, the last few decades have seen the construction of a ‘new’ fin de siècle which is increasingly regarded as ‘a distinctive and diverse cultural moment rather than as a limbo-like “age of transition”’ (1996: 3). Fin de siècle modernity involved not only the technological and industrial changes decried by Nordau, but also changes in literary and cultural climate. Distinct fin de siècle characters such as the Aesthete and the New Woman, artistic movements such as decadence and aestheticism, and specific discourses on gender, sexuality and empire emerged in this era of commercialisation of literature. Alongside changes such as the increase in periodicals and magazines, the emergence of organised literary agents and the figure of the Grub Street author, the New Woman became a popular literary motif and subject matter.