Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity

“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity” considers the politics of late twentieth-century feminist reclamation work in modernist literary studies. Many prolific women artists were doubly left behind, first by the New Critics, and then, several generations later, by feminist scholars who, in their work recovering women artists lost to New Criticism’s masculinist narrative did not find a place for them in what quickly became a narrow, and predictable, feminist canon. This chapter focuses on Amy Lowell and Edith Sitwell, women whose multiple roles as poets, editors, and critics allowed them significant access to power and with it, the opportunity to mentor and support other women. And yet, as the chapter demonstrates, they did not. Despite rich personal relationships with women, neither Sitwell nor Lowell had significant or lasting professional relationships with other women. Their subsequent exclusion from feminist modernist literary criticism perhaps tells us as much about the identifications and interests that drove late twentieth-century feminist recovery work as it does about the inclusion of more now-canonical figures.

Peggy Guggenheim’s and Bryher’s Investment

“Peggy Guggenheim’s and Bryher’s Investment: How Financial Speculation Created a Female Modernist Tradition” focuses on the patronage of two wealthy women, Peggy Guggenheim and Bryher, in order to examine how these patrons shaped modernism produced by women. The chapter also considers other female modernists such as H.D. and Mina Loy. I examine how modernist patronage required both a living subsidy and a willingness to provide pipelines to publication. Further, I argue that in these two cases, the source of the money helps predict the mode of patronage and ultimately the canon; the patron’s literary and artistic investment replicates the financial investments from which they derive their fortunes and predicts their willingness to underwrite experimental projects.

Virginia Woolf and Mina Loy

In “Virginia Woolf and Mina Loy: Modernist Affiliations,” Erica Gene Delsandro encourages feminist modernist scholars to imagine beyond the male-dominated story of modernism by challenging iconicity and canonicity through her reading of Woolf and Loy. By focusing on two modernist women writers who are rarely studied in tandem, this chapter proposes alternative ways of reading that privilege affiliations and resonances, tracing modernist motifs throughout Woolf’s and Loy’s writing. In so doing, Delsandro advocates for more inclusive and expansive reading practices that invite feminist modernists to remake modernism in their scholarship and in their classrooms.

Bringing Women Together, in Theory

“Bringing Women Together, in Theory” explores which theories allow feminist modernist scholars to treat as worthy subjects of study more women writers than just those representative few about whom most monographs have been written, thus levelling the playing field between so-called major and minor writers. In the late twentieth-century the historically tense relationship between feminist criticism’s roots in liberal humanism, even as it has had to argue against its definitional constraints, put it in conceptual tension with post-structuralist theory from which feminist theory stemmed. These differences created a contentious and hierarchical relationship in the late-twentieth century between feminist scholars of modernism from which we may now just be emerging. This chapter analyzes the work of May Sinclair and also explores affect theory, low theory, transvaluation, and skepticism.

Iconic Shade … and Other Professional Hazards of Woolf Scholarship

“Iconic Shade” addresses in a humorous way some of the ironies associated with writing and teaching about a literary “icon” such as Virginia Woolf in a volume dedicated to expanding our conception of literary modernism to include women writers beyond the “big three” (H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf). What happens when a previously marginalized writer becomes institutionalized in the canon? Or when previously marginalized scholars become absorbed and transformed by institutional structures that previously excluded them? Woolf herself wrote perceptively about the ambivalence of being situated both inside and outside of dominant culture. Her insights (communicated in her critical chapters) might be helpful to those of us who straddle the line between belonging and marginalization in dominant culture, and who are often tasked with what Sara Ahmed has called “diversity work” within academe. While diversity work is often painful and thankless, the public university is nevertheless still an important site to protect from neoliberal instrumentalization, as it is one of the few places where the democratizing hope of liberal education is still (if in some cases barely) alive.

Emma Goldman among the Avant-Garde

This chapter argues that Emma Goldman’s anarchist feminism is a vital, if under-studied, influence on modernist women’s communities. Despite the generation separating them, Goldman and modernist women, such as Margaret Anderson and Emily Holmes Coleman, were united by their improvised personal lives and pursuit of individual liberty in the realm of art and politics. In the fight against censorship, Goldman’s little magazine Mother Earth was a direct role model for Anderson in her fight to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Little Review; a decade later, Coleman provided Goldman with editorial assistance (and occasional resistance) in the writing of Goldman’s Living My Life. Further, both Anderson and Coleman introduced Goldman to modernist writers like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, challenging Goldman to reconsider her ideas of what counted as revolutionary in the fields of art and literature. Through their aesthetic and political differences, we observe an early example of intergenerational American feminism negotiating influence and relevance. Ultimately, Goldman’s work as an anarchist activist and public speaker, especially her focus on women’s autonomy and freedom, provided the groundwork for the experimental personal lives and networks of support that shaped modernist women’s communities.

The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson

This chapter argues that earlier assessments of Mary Hutchinson’s writing have tended to conflate her status as a feminine arbiter of taste with her work, seeing the two as similarly irrational and slight. Such assessments have contributed to the pervasive assumption that Hutchinson is not a writer of substance and they have been instrumental in facilitating her obscurity and associating her work with a conservative concept of femininity. Instead, this chapter situates Hutchinson’s writing in relation to the Bloomsbury group’s interest in art and argues that her complex articulation of early twentieth-century femininity in Fugitive Pieces (1927) has been unjustly trivialized because of its association with the realm of fashion. Drawing from extensive archival research, this chapter shows how Hutchinson repeatedly puts femininity and modernity into conversation as she interrogates what it would mean if feminine phenomena were given a central place in our cultural analysis of modernity.

Modernism and Middlebrow through the Eyes of Object Studies

This chapter argues that an object-orientated approach puts texts from a range of cultural registers into dialogue with one another and fruitfully reconfigures how a high modernist work like Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas might be read on its own. After providing examples of how a range of British and American authors and illustrators (including Rachel Ferguson, Winifred Kirkland, James Joyce, Bert Thomas, and Woolf) represent second-hand attire, the chapter examines the new tools and resources available to scholars that make a research project organized around objects possible. The chapter concludes by examining challenges to object-oriented study, including the difficulty of determining the range and scope of a project and the resistant qualities of things themselves. A gown designed by Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young, a court dressmaker who produced the garments worn by Virginia and Vanessa Stephen when they made their society debut, serves as an example of what we can and cannot know about objects and the people who possessed them.

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.

Introduction

The chapters in this volume are intended as sources of generation, encouraging scholars and teachers to stretch their critical feminist imaginations toward discovery and possibility, revision and reinvention. This volume strives for an approach that is motivated by discovery, empathy, and excitement. In so doing, the chapters in this volume are not as interested in what secrets scholars can reveal hidden in the texts we read or what counter-ideologies authors have smuggled into their work—the orientation of a suspicious approach. Rather, the chapters in this volume are eager to explore modernist women writers and their work in order to imagine a fresh approach to modernism—the orientation of openness. Instead of excavating, defamiliarizing, and disrupting, the scholars included here intend to open, offer, and amplify. Moreover, the authors in this volume are committed to scholarly introspection: the orientation of openness through which they approach their examination of modernist women writers is also at play in their reflection on our collective feminist project, illustrating the political tensions that infuse our reading postures and writing processes.