As a literary genre firmly committed to social reform, late nineteenth-century New Woman fiction raises fundamental questions about literature’s ability to have real-world effects—on its readers, and, by extension, on the world at large. While many Victorian writers and critics shared the assumption that reading fiction could indeed change a person’s mind (and addressed/warned their readers accordingly), this question remains the object of much debate in contemporary narrative theory and its related fields like critical discourse analysis and the cognitive sciences

Despite being ubiquitous, the exact relationship between narrative representation and ideological formation remains undertheorized to this day, and the majority of models of narrative perspective still rely on cognitively biased metaphors of “point of view” to account for the shaping of narrative meanings in narrative discourse. Yet, from an ideological standpoint, what matters is not who sees, to take up Genette’s famous question (or even who perceives, as others have advanced since), but who knows, or more precisely, what exactly counts as “knowledge” or “truth” in a given storyworld.

Drawing on elements from cognitive and rhetorical narratologies, I approach narrative perspective as a sense-making activity entwined in ideology, and I chart its different configurations in a selection of short stories written in the 1890s advocating for the New Woman, an idealized figure of liberated womanhood. By tracing the levels at which New Woman ideology is inscribed textually in a variety of short forms ranging from allegories to realist sketches, I endeavor to shed light on the means by which represented discourses can be made to cross the threshold from the realm of opinion to that of “fact”—albeit in fiction.