Born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the New Woman – the fictional heroine who eschewed marriage as her calling, who asserted her intellectual and economic independence, and who challenged the moral double standard – has remained a fixture in English fiction. This paper will explore how the New Woman is re-imagined in the context of twenty first century novels in English that have been written, in what ways she carries her predecessor's legacy, and in what ways she has been changed, and how much, as a reflection of neoliberal economics, digital mediation and an increasingly intersectional definition of gender. Grounded in an in-depth analysis of a range of contemporary British novels, including Zadie Smith's NW, Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Normal People, Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy, and Diana Evans's Ordinary People, the paper proposes that the New Woman of the present is neither complete nor final, but rather a process of actualization and authentication that is often fraught with anxiety and ambiguity, unfolding in a field of conditions that claim to offer emancipation from the structures of subjectivity, but quietly deplete their material roots. The paper concludes that the continued existence of the New Woman as a critical category proves both the futility of emancipation her own nineteenth century predecessors had envisioned, and the continued value of fiction as a medium through which that futility can be explored.