Sisters And Rivals In British Women S Fiction 1914 39

What happens when two women love the same man? This is the first book to examine female rivalry as a distinctive theme in women's fiction and to analyze the female-identified erotic triangle, where two women are rivals for the same man, as a narrative pattern which has a special resonance for inter-war women writers. Focusing on five key writers, Diana Wallace offers a reconsideration of inter-war women's writing and an examination of the links and rivalries between women writers themselves.

Catherine Clay's persuasively argued and rigorously documented study examines women's friendships during the period between the two world wars. Building on extensive new archival research, the book's organizing principle is a series of literary-historical case-studies that explore the practices, meanings and effects of friendship within a network of British women writers, who were all loosely connected to the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Clay considers the letters and diaries, as well as fiction, poetry, autobiographies and journalistic writings, of authors such as Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Stella Benson, to examine women's friendships in relation to two key contexts: the rise of the professional woman writer under the shadow of literary modernism and historic shifts in the cultural recognition of lesbianism crystallized by The Well of Loneliness trial in 1928. While Clay's study presents substantial evidence to support the crucial role close and enduring friendships played in women's professional achievements, it also boldly addresses the limitations and denials of these relationships. Producing 'biographies of friendship' untold in existing author studies, her book also challenges dominant accounts of women's friendships and advances new ways for thinking about women's friendship in contemporary debates.

From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

This study of contemporary and later critical responses to the work of the novelist Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) offers an original approach to twentieth-century literary history by foregrounding the cultural and commercial fields in which Lehmann's writing was situated. Wendy Pollard examines the effect recent developments in literary theory and movements from modernism to feminism have had on Lehmann's literary reception. She also considers the interpolation of a damning third category between te and popular culture, namely middlebrow; a widening gender divide in readership; controversies within book reviewing; changes in the publishing world; and the introduction of popularist means of book marketing. While considering the general privileging of male authors from the 1920s to the 1950s, Lehmann's most prolific period, Pollard argues that her novels have been unfairly subjected to specific forms of neglect, and their exclusion from many academic comparative studies is due to a diversity of form and content that can also be considered their strength.

This study provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, autobiographers) and topics. It provides contextualizing material, with concise introductions to related topics, including organizations, movements, genres and publications.

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.