AustLit

'Catherine Helen Spence presents the fictional lost colony as a utopian space for the radical feminist transformation of marriage and the state. Her settlers have intermarried with an indigenous group and reinvented marriage to include a probationary period of 'handfasting' where couples live as if married for a year and a day before deciding whether they wish to confirm their relationships more permanently with marriage. Though too early to be considered a 'New Woman' novel, Handfasted positions its brand of feminism with many of the discursive strategies that late nineteenth-century New Women novelists used, including the argument that women's rights and sexual freedom would help Anglo-Saxon women act as nation and empire builders. Greater Britain offers an important theoretical lens for the novel as a whole and for Spence's brand of feminism. Dilke's Greater Britain continues, saying that America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue.'

Source: Abstract.