The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works

This chapter approaches serial literary autofictions as a distinct variant of autofictional writing. While discussions of life writing often focus on male authors, the chapter redresses this imbalance by considering women writers, specifically the works of Dorothy Richardson, Doris Lessing, and Rachel Cusk. The approach is new in exploring the autofictional in serial, literary works, and tracing connections across an author’s oeuvre. Such a focus leads to an extended understanding of autofiction and the autofictional as challenging autobiographical unity and coherence. The chapter distinguishes between different forms of seriality (including series, serial, and serialized life narratives), and argues that serial publications and structures enhance literary and autofictional tendencies in that they draw attention to the complexities of autobiographical representation.

“For I Asked Him Men's Questions”: Late Eighteenth-Century British Women Tourists’ Contributions to Scientific Inquiry

“We endeavoured with some tools our servants had, to carry some pieces of it with us,” Caroline Powys wrote of her visit to Stonehenge in 1759. “Tho’ our party were chiefly female,” she remarked, “we had no more curiosity than the learn'd gentlemen of the Royal Society.” Carolyn was not alone in challenging the gendered demarcation of scientific observation. From the second half of the century, British women travelers carefully packed minerals in cases, filled bags with botanical specimens, and roamed the shores in search of shells and seaweed. This article proposes that British women of the late eighteenth century used the empirical approach promoted by their polite scientific education to turn their leisured travels into knowledge-finding pursuits. The specimens and observations that they brought home played an overlooked role in allowing them to shape themselves as authoritative observers within the larger scientific knowledge-building enterprise that drew from the diffusion of Enlightenment classificatory systems, overseas exploration, and trade. This article brings to light four understudied eighteenth-century female empiricists: the mistress of Hardwick House, Whitchurch, Oxfordshire, Caroline Lybbe Powys (1738–1817); the first woman to publish a Grand Tour account, Lady Anna Miller (1741–81) of Batheaston, Somerset; the unmarried daughter of the rector of Thornton in Craven, Yorkshire, Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819); and the Whig political salon hostess, Lady Elizabeth Holland (1732–95). Each woman is of interest in her own right, but together, as I will argue, their scientific contributions add significantly to the ongoing investigation of the role that women played in developing Enlightenment science.

Modernist Dante

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

Modernism and Physical Illness

T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’, it demonstrates that modernism is, on the contrary, invested in physical illness as a subject, method, and stylizing force. Experience of physical ailments, from the fleeting to the fatal, the familiar to the unusual, structures the writing of the modernists, both as sufferers and onlookers. Illness reorients the relation to and appearance of the world, making it appear newly strange; it determines the character of human interactions, and models of behaviour. As a topic illness requires new ways of writing and thinking, altered ideas of the subject, and a re-examination of the roles of invalids and carers. This book reads the work five authors, who are also known for their illness, hypochondria, or medical work: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. It overturns the assumption that illness is a simple obstacle to creativity and instead argues that it is a subject of careful thought and cultural significance.

Cutting and Pasting the Popular Press

This article offers a survey of the recently discovered scrapbooks collated over a number of decades by the Yorkshirewoman Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819). The large set of thirty-five volumes presents an important collection of press cuttings relating to the history and consequences of the French Revolution, and also contains ‘historical and miscellaneous’ material of a more eclectic nature. I argue that the texts significantly improve our understanding of Dorothy Richardson’s position as a reader, writer and researcher working in the North of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, her set of albums raises important questions about the relationship between commonplacing and scrapbooking practices, and the capacity of such textual curatorship to function as a form of both political engagement and autobiographical expression.

Editing Experiment: The New Modernist Editing and Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage

This article examines the challenges experimental writing poses for textual editing, drawing on the experience of the Dorothy Richardson Editions Project, which was inaugurated in 2007 with the aim of producing new scholarly editions of Richardson's fiction and letters. Here we focus on Richardson's thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67) and the particular problems its constantly unfolding experimental aesthetic present for both the critic and the scholarly editor. We adopt Adorno's concept of ‘constructive methods’ to describe Richardson's project, the composition of a narrative without a predictable endpoint, asking what kind of editorial practice best captures her unconventional and deliberately inconsistent approach to writing. We conclude by discussing the implications that editing Pilgrimage might have for a broader understanding of modernist aesthetics.

Writing Modernist Women

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.