The ‘My Story’ Series:

A Neo-Victorian Education in Feminism

Abstract

Neo-Victorian novels for young adult readers – especially the first-person narratives of Scholastic’s ‘My Story’ series, which is marketed to girls – are providing a feminist education and employing fiction to encourage political awareness in the present, even as they connect contemporary audiences with activists of the past. The antecedents for this genre of didactic feminist fiction, which uses the nineteenth century and draws on actual historical figures for its anti-patriarchal lessons, are to be found in works such as Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), indicating that the origin of what we call neo-Victorian literature may have been earlier than most scholars have suggested.