‘A Journal of the Period’: Modernism and Conservative Modernity in Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial (1919–29)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Rosamond Lehmann ◽  
Printed Materials ◽  
Dialogic Space

This chapter examines and puts into context the ‘modernist turn’ of Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a popular fashion magazine marketed to middle-class female readers in the interwar period (1919-1929). While many of its society columns and features unquestionably endorsed traditional, patriarchal values, the fact that editors also reviewed and commissioned work by modernist women writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Radclyffe Hall, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf, shows that the magazine was fashioned as a dialogic space that aimed to address the various, at times contradictory, experiences and interests of women in the interwar period.  By analysing the particulars of this productive dialogue between conservatism and progressiveness in Eve, the chapter advances research on interwar periodical culture, suggesting that some existing critical designations such as ‘little,’ ‘smart,’ or ‘service’ inadequately describe the heterogeneity of the printed materials found in this particular 1920s magazine.

Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Important Concern ◽  
Rosamond Lehmann

An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the Flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity’s economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.

Modernism’s Unfinished Lives

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Melanie Micir
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner

This chapter reassesses the importance of biography, broadly conceived, for modernist, midcentury, and contemporary women writers and scholars. It draws together a diverse archive of biographical acts, such as published and unpublished books, drafts, outlines, fragments, letters, annotations, collections, objects, and ephemera. In the experimental life writing of canonical mainstays like Virginia Woolf, the intimate archives of Radclyffe Hall and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the abandoned projects of Djuna Barnes and Hope Mirrlees, the midcentury memoirs and literary collections of Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, and Alice B. Toklas, and the more contemporary recovery projects of Lisa Cohen, Jenny Diski, Monique Truong, and Kate Zambreno, the biographical impulse signals a shared ethical drive to develop a counternarrative of literary history grounded in women's lives. The chapter then tracks the interest in preservation across biographical novels, histories, and archives. It uncovers the modernist prehistory of the contemporary queer feminist recovery project.

The Dream Work of a Nation: From Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen to Mary Lavin

2020 ◽  
pp. 387-398
Author(s):  
Patricia Laurence
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Dream Work ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Women’S Writing

Virginia Woolf provides a backbone for important arguments that transform our reading of women’s writing during times of rising nationalism and war. In Three Guineas and elsewhere, she creates a new ground for fiction by including what is commonly thought a ‘small’ rather than a ‘large’ subject, and she creates links between domestic and public ‘tyranny’. Woolf challenges the claims of critics who assert that women writers do not engage with or link their fiction to the wider society, the nation and the world. Inspired by Woolf, the Irish authors, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Lavin, illuminate these ‘small’ shocks and events in the lives of individuals, families, communities and institutions. Bowen provides ‘in-between’ glimpses of war in her wartime stories, Ivy Gripped the Steps while Lavin creates close-ups of ‘small’ scenes of beleaguered widows, loyal wives, enfeebled husbands, independent daughters, and needy clergy in her short stories. The intimate lives revealed in these stories are not ‘outside’ of politics and history and the world but are a part of the historical texture of life. They present a resistance to dominant views and richer definitions of the future of community: the dream work of a nation.

Envoi

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Suez Crisis ◽  
The Cold War

It is 1956, the height of the Cold War. The year will end in the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf have both been dead for a while, Jean Rhys is all but forgotten and Rosamond Lehmann’s career as a novelist is on the wane....

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing with In-Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Mendez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Women’S Writing

In Alice Munro’s short story “The Office,” the protagonist claims an office of her own in which to write. Munro’s narrative can thus be read as engaging with the ideas on the spatial conditions for women’s writing which Virginia Woolf famously explored in A Room of One’s Own. My paper takes this thematic connection as a point of departure for suggesting that a Woolfian legacy shapes Munro’s “The Office” in ways which go beyond a shared interest in spaces for women’s writing. Both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” this paper argues, use the discussion of women’s writing spaces as a launching pad for exploring in how far women writers may claim for themselves traditionally masculine positions of authorship and authority, and in what ways authoritative forms of literary discourse may be transformed by women’s writing. In both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” the interruption as element of plot and rhetorical strategy plays a central role in answering these questions.

Kenya Colony and the Kenya Novel: The East African Heritage of “A Very Fine Negress” in A Room of One’s Own

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Dubino
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
African Women ◽  
East African ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The People ◽  
African Women Writers ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Isak Dinesen

‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time Virginia Woolf’s narrator made this observation in the late 1920s, a number of her British and other European contemporary women writers were in fact passing by and indeed living among black women in one of Great Britain’s colonies, Kenya. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) was among the most famous, and her memoir Out of Africa (1937), commemorates her years on a Kenyan plantation (1914-1931). Along with the canonical Danish Dinesen were British women whose work has been long forgotten, including Nora K. Strange (1884-1974) and Florence Riddell (1885-1960), both of whom wrote what is called the “Kenya Novel.” The Kenya Novel is a subgenre of romantic fiction set in the white highlands of Britain’s Crown Colony Kenya. The titles alone—e.g., Kenya Calling (1928) and Courtship in Kenya (1932) by Strange, and Kismet in Kenya (1927) and Castles in Kenya (1929) by Riddell—give a flavor of their content. Because these novels were popular in Britain, it is very likely that Woolf knew about them, but she does not refer to them in her diaries, letters, or published writing. Even so, it would be worth testing this famous comment by a Room’s narrator about (white) women’s lack of propensity to recreate others in her own image, or more specifically, to dominate the colonial other. How do Woolf’s white contemporaries, living in Kenya, represent black women? Given that Strange and Riddell were part of the settler class, we can expect that their views reflect dominant colonial ideology. The formulaic nature of the Kenya Novel, and its focus on the lives of white settlers, also mean that the portrayal of the lives of the people whose lands were brutally expropriated would hardly be treated with respect or as little more than backdrops. Yet it is important to understand these other global contexts in which Woolf is working and the role that some of her contemporary women writers played in the shaping of them. This paper concludes with an overview of the separate legacies of Woolf and her fellow Anglo-African women writers up to the present day.

Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo: A Brazilian Perspective

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Aparecida de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Victoria Ocampo

This paper aims at investigating how Woolf influenced Ocampo’s literary production; it might be through Ocampo’s Testemonies or in her journal Sur. It also our aim to analyse how Ocampo divulged Virginia Woolf’s writings in all Spanish-speaking countries through translations, lectures, publications and especially through her passion in talking about Woolf. Through Ocampo’s gaze, Woolf’s image and writing was understood in a different way, which goes beyond the European’s boundaries. This relationship has contributed tremendously for both of them, as women writers and intellectuals of their time. Ocampo’s progress as a writer had a dramatic impact after meeting Woolf. Above all, Ocampo contributed immensely for spreading Woolf’s writings.

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