A Space of Their Own: Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950 PDF
Preview A Space of Their Own: Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950
A Space of Their Own 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. Katie Baker was awarded a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chester in 2018. Her research focuses on female sexuality, domesticity and the ‘businesswoman’ in the work of nineteenth-century women writers. She has published on Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant and is currently an independent researcher. Naomi Walker is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. Her PhD research was based on the two Shropshire feminist writers, Mary Webb (1881–1927) and Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925), and she used GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software to plot their lives and works within the Shropshire area. Among the Victorians and Modernists Edited by Dennis Denisoff This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered. Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End Edited by Diana Maltz Writers at War Exploring the Prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Siegfried Sassoon and Mary Borden Isabelle Brasme Hotel Modernisms Edited by Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi Legal Narratives in Victorian Fiction Joanne Bridget Simpson A Space of Their Own Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950 Edited by Katie Baker and Naomi Walker For more information about this series, please visit: https://www .routledge .com/ Among- the -Victorians -and- Modernists/ book- series/ ASHSER4035 A Space of Their Own Women, Writing and Place 1850–1950 Edited by Katie Baker and Naomi Walker First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Katie Baker and Naomi Walker; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Katie Baker and Naomi Walker to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-21809-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-21810-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27010-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003270102 Typeset in Sabon LT Std by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 KATIE BAKER AND NAOMI WALKER PART 1 Women writing the domestic space 15 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 17 KATIE BAKER 2 ‘The room I sit in’: Women’s refashioning of the drawing-room in fin-de-siècle and modernist writing 29 EMMA LIGGINS 3 ‘Fleece in the hedge’: Domesticity and depiction among women writers of the interwar years 44 GERALDINE PERRIAM PART 2 Women writing the rural space 59 4 Mountains, therapy, and the peripatetic writing space: Elizabeth Le Blond in France and Switzerland in the 1880s 61 KATHRYN WALCHESTER vi Contents 5 Walking and writing the rural: Mary Webb and the Shropshire landscape 74 NAOMI WALKER 6 Spangin’ and stravaiging: Scottish women writers and the nature of rural modernity 87 HELENA DUNCAN PART 3 Women writing the public space 101 7 ‘There’s London!’: Spatial affects and urban environments in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s: The Story of a Modern Woman 103 CIGDEM TALU 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 114 LOUISE MCDONALD PART 4 Women writing new interpretations of space 127 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 129 JOSIE BILLINGTON 10 R. A. Kartini and the many faces of colonial female subject: Domestic cosmopolitanism in colonial Indonesia 143 SILVIA MAYASARI-HOFFERT 11 Spatial and sensory aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) 158 ANNIE STRAUSA Conclusion 171 KATIE BAKER AND NAOMI WALKER Index 173 Notes on contributors Katie Baker was awarded a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chester in 2018. Her research focuses on female sexuality, domesticity and the ‘businesswoman’ in the work of nineteenth-century women writ- ers. She has published on Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant and is currently an independent researcher. Josie Billington is Professor in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She has published extensively on Victorian women writers – including Faithful Realism (2002), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2007) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012) – and produced scholarly editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (2006), Margaret Oliphant’s Novellas (2013) and The Ladies Lindores (2016), George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (2015) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 21st Century Oxford Authors (2018). Her recent publications include Is Literature Healthy? (2016) and Reading and Mental Health (ed. 2020). She is currently writing a monograph on Literature and Pain for Bloomsbury. Helena Duncan is currently studying part-time for her PhD at Edinburgh Napier University, where she is researching early twentieth-century Scottish women’s writing and rural modernity with a focus on the writ- ing of Willa Muir, Lorna Moon and Nan Shepherd. Helena has previ- ously lead tutorials in two Undergraduate English Literature modules at Edinburgh Napier, and she has presented work at conferences across the UK as well as internationally. She is particularly interested in rural watchfulness, the tensions between tradition and modernity in interwar women’s writing and the ‘stravaiger’ as a rural, Scottish alternative to the flâneur figure. Emma Liggins is Reader in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include George Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Ashgate, 2006), The British Short Story (with Andrew Maunder & Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2011), Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British viii Notes on contributors Women’s Fiction, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2014) and The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945 (Palgrave, 2020). She has also published an arti- cle on Vernon Lee and the supernatural in Gothic Studies (2013). She has a chapter on modernist women’s ghost stories in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now, eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and a chapter on ‘The Edwardian Supernatural’ in Twentieth-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert is a Lecturer in Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, where she obtained her PhD. Her research interests concern the role of literature and culture in socio-polit- ical life, power relations and post-colonialism. Her research on memory (re-)construction in Indonesian literary expressions after 1965 has been published as book chapters in Literature Education in the Asia-Pacific (Routledge, 2018) and Subaltern Women’s Narratives: Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies (Routledge, 2021). Louise McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in English at Newman University. Her main research interest is middlebrow women’s literature, 1900– 1965. She has published widely on the work of middlebrow writer Clemence Dane and is the author of Clemence Dane: Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Inter-War Years (London: Routledge 2020). She also has a research interest in film adaptation studies, particularly cinematic ver- sions of Victorian novels. Her publications in this field include essays on Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and cin- ematic versions of George Du Maurier’s Trilby. She is currently working as the guest editor of an upcoming Special Issue of Humanities entitled ‘Adapting Fiction into Visual Culture’. Geraldine Perriam is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and is also Vice-Chair of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. Her research explores the work and lives of women writers of the first half of the twentieth century with particular focus on the interwar years. Publications include work on Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers and Angela Thirkell. As well as investigating themes of gender and place, Geraldine examines the professional lives of women authors and the circulation and reception of their texts. Other areas of research include therapeutic landscapes, data analysis of women in the twenty-first century workplace and crime fiction. Her background in teaching has been put to good use developing writing programmes for undergraduates and training post- graduates in research methods. Annie Strausa is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. Her project is also supported by Cardiff University and funded by the South West Notes on contributors ix and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Annie was elected as the first Graduate Student Representative for the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) in 2020. Her work explores the intersection between feminist modernist studies and sensory studies. She is especially interested in twentieth-century women writers, feminist theory, gender studies, criti- cal race theory and experimental literature. Her thesis focuses on work by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor and Naomi Mitchison. She is cur- rently writing a chapter for a new collection of essays on Gloria Naylor’s archives. Cigdem Talu is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at McGill University. Her dissertation focuses on women’s experience in nine- teenth-century London, the concept of urban atmospheres, the history of emotions and urban travel writing. She also works on American writer Shirley Jackson’s life and novels analysed through architecture, and female agency and set design in 1960s and 1970s horror cinema. Her research is supported by the Bombardier Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She holds B.Arch, M.Arch and post-professional M.Arch degrees from Politecnico di Milano and McGill University. Kathryn Walchester is Reader and Subject Leader for English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published widely on wom- en’s European travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, north- ern travel and mountaineering. Her publications include Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway (Anthem, 2014), Travelling Servants: Mobility and Employment in British Fiction and Travel Writing 1750-1850 (Routledge, 2019) and Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary, co-edited with Charles Forsdick and Zoë Kinsley (Anthem 2019). Naomi Walker is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. Her PhD research was based on the two Shropshire feminist writers, Mary Webb (1881–1927) and Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925), and she used GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software to plot their lives and works within the Shropshire area.
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