As the temporal and spatial journeys of this book have, I hope, illustrated, literary railway spaces emerge first and foremost as spaces of ambivalence, where the precarious dichotomies between private and public, inner and outer, stasis and mobility, fragmentation and continuity progressively affect feminine perception, subjectivity, and identity. The more the railway consolidates its role as an ideological and technological tool of progress, the more women resist its authority as an arbiter of time, discipline, and manners. If in the 1860s and 70s women's resistance is expressed through strategies of masquerade and deception, in later years the train offers opportunities for agency in terms of escape, emancipation, sexual mobility, or other transgressive impulses. By the fin de siècle the enclosed space of the carriage has become the material equivalent to the chamber of consciousness in which layers of the mind are unfolded and mental trajectories followed. With this turn inward, the subjectivity of woman explored during her occupancy of a carriage seat becomes more elusive as interior monologue and free indirect discourse provide partial access to a conflicted self. Realist narrative practices falter as she progressively defies the standardisation of time, rejecting temporal and spatial precision. The woman in the train carriage becomes increasingly an enigma to herself as well as to her fellow travellers with whom she often experiences a mutual estrangement. Yet this obscurity may ensure the privacy of the soul.1 It may also save woman from the levelling depersonalisation and uniformity that the railway introduced, as the early texts of Frances Trollope and Frances Browne anticipated.

Perhaps it is for this that the woman in the carriage becomes for Virginia Woolf the ultimate symbol of the difficulty of representing character in fiction. In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924) Woolf challenges her adversaries, the Edwardian writers, to try and figure out the lonely figure of an elderly woman railway passenger sitting quietly in a corner of a carriage. Yet, rather than submitting to the objectifying or materialistic impulses that Woolf attributes to her imaginary male copassengers – Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells – Mrs Brown defies complete knowingness via traditional representational techniques.