This collection explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers incorporated the idea of ‘place’ into their writing. Whether writing from a specific location or focusing upon a particular geographical or imaginary place, women writers working between 1850 and 1950 valued ‘a space of their own’ in which to work. The period on which this collection focuses straddles two main areas of study, nineteenth century writing and early twentieth century/modernist writing, so it enables discussion of how ideas of space progressed alongside changes in styles of writing. It looks to the many ways women writers explored concepts of space and place and how they expressed these through their writings, for example how they interpreted both urban and rural landscapes and how they presented domestic spaces.
A Space of Their Own will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and modernist works as it covers a period of immense change for women’s rights in society. It is also not limited to just one type or definition of ‘space’. Therefore, it may also be of interest to academics outside of literature – for example, in gender studies, cultural geography, place writing and digital humanities.
Author(s): Katie Baker, Naomi Walker
Series: Among the Victorians and Modernists
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 189
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I Women writing the domestic space
Chapter 1 ‘It is home, and I can’t put its charm into words’ (Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South): Radically extending domesticity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
Chapter 2 ‘The room I sit in’: Women’s refashioning of the drawing-room in fin-de-siècle and modernist writing
Chapter 3 ‘Fleece in the hedge’: Domesticity and depiction among women writers of the interwar years
Part II Women writing the rural space
Chapter 4 Mountains, therapy, and the peripatetic writing space: Elizabeth Le Blond in France and Switzerland in the 1880s
Chapter 5 Walking and writing the rural: Mary Webb and the Shropshire landscape
Chapter 6 Spangin’ and stravaiging: Scottish women writers and the nature of rural modernity
Part III Women writing the public space
Chapter 7 ‘There’s London!’: Spatial affects and urban environments in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s: The Story of a Modern Woman
Chapter 8 Utopian spaces, public places: Considering the perils and pleasures of crossing domestic thresholds in The Women’s Side and The More I See of Men
Part IV Women writing new interpretations of space
Chapter 9 ‘Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her’ (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda): Lyric space in nineteenth-century women’s writing
Chapter 10 R. A. Kartini and the many faces of colonial female subject: Domestic cosmopolitanism in colonial Indonesia
Chapter 11 Spatial and sensory aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928)
Conclusion
Index
