Her success as a novelist was due to the strong romantic and sexual element in her books and to her skill in characterisation. [Wilde et al., 142]
Iota's work was more favourable to a traditional view of femininity than some other new-woman writers. Yet she often locates this femininity in unconventional relationships and among women cut off by circumstances from the possibility of emotionally fulfilling relationships [Murphy, 204]
Biographical Material
Works
Bibliography
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Grehan, Madonna. “‘From the sphere of Sarah Gampism’: the professionalisation of nursing and midwifery in the Colony of Victoria.” Nursing Inquiry 11, 3 (2004): 192–201.
Heilmann, Anne. New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Hetherington, Naomi. “Feminism, Freethought, and the Sexual Subject in Colonial New Woman Fiction: Olive Schreiner and Kathleen Mannington Caffyn.” Victorian Review, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Fall 2011): 47–59.
Iota [Kathleen Mannington Caffyn], A Yellow Aster, London: Hutchinson & Co, 1894; also available on Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust and the Internet Archive.
Murphy, James H. Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
O’Toole, Tina. The Irish New Woman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Pykett, Lyn. The "Improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992.
Solomon, Geulah. “Stephen Mannington Caffyn (1850–1896).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 3, 1851–1890, ed. by Douglas Pike, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/caffyn-stephen-mannington-3137
Wilde, William H., Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. 2nd ed. Melbourne, Oxford, Auckland and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Created 28 September 2026