Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces

205 Pages·2013·3.02 MB·English

by  Teresa Gómez Reus, Terry Gifford (eds.)

Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces
Women in Transit through
Literary Liminal Spaces
Edited by
Teresa Gómez Reus and Terry Gifford
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Teresa Gómez Reus and
Terry Gifford 2013
Remaining chapters © Contributors 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-33046-8
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
p ublication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or t ransmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting l imited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above c ompanies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-46104-2 ISBN 978-1-137-33047-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137330475
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and m anufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
For Elaine Showalter,
pioneering scholar of women’s writing
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements x
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Teresa Gómez Reus and Terry Gifford
Part I New Women, Old Patterns
1 ‘Nobody’s child must sleep under Somebody’s
roof – and why not yours?’ Adventures of the Female
Ego in Dickens, George Meredith’s The Egoist and
Wilkie Collins’s No Name 17
Shannon Russell
2 ‘Dangerous Domestic Secrets’ on Trial in The Law
and the Lady by Wilkie Collins 32
Janet Stobbs Wright
3 ‘Running on lines’: Women and the Railway in
Victorian and Early Modernist Culture 47
Anna Despotopoulou
4 Stepping Out: ‘At Home’ or ‘From our Own Correspondent’?
The Lady Writer or the Woman Journalist? 61
Valerie Fehlbaum
Part II The Call of the Wild
5 ‘I write the truth as I see it’: Unsettling the Boundaries
of Gender, Travel Writing and Ethnography in Isabella
Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan 77
Daniela Kato
6 Early Women Mountaineers Achieve Both Summits
and Publication in Britain and America 91
Terry Gifford
7 Racing to the Front: Auto- mobility and Competing
Narratives of Women in the First World War 107
Teresa Gómez Reus
vii
viii Contents
Part III Redrawing the Boundaries
8 ‘Always Coming and Going’: The In- Between Spaces
of Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Novels 125
Emma Short
9 Moving Back to ‘Home’ and ‘Nation’: Women
Dramatists, 1938– 1945 139
Rebecca D’Monté
10 Spatial Parody, Theatricalization and Constructions
of ‘Self’ in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and
Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café 151
Frances Piper
11 ‘Fritillary Fever’: Cultivating the Self and Gardening
the World in the Writing of Clara Coltman Vyvyan 166
Niamh Downing
Bibliography 180
Index 193
List of Illustrations
6.1 Henriette D’Angeville is raised above the height
of Mont Blanc by her guides, 4 September 1838.
(Photo: Alpine Club) 94
6.2 ‘Turning the Corner’, The Illustrated London News,
18 September 1886 97
6.3 Fanny Bullock Workman photographed with a newspaper
headline ‘Votes for Women’ at nearly 21,000 feet on Silver
Throne plateau, Karakoram, 1912. (Photo: Library of Congress) 103
7.1 A member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD)
starts up the engine of her ambulance at Etaples, France,
27 June 1917 © Imperial War Museum (Q 2446) 112
7.2 The two ‘Women of Pervyse’, Mairi Chisholm and the
Baroness T’Serclaes, driving their motor ambulance through
the ruins of Pervyse © Imperial War Museum (Q 2660) 119
7.3 Miss Mairi Chisholm driving the motor- cycle with Baroness
T’Serclaes in the s ide- car, past the ruins of their second ‘poste’,
destroyed by shellfire, 11 September 1917 © Imperial War
Museum (Q 2968) 120
ix
Acknowledgements
In the creation of this volume we have found ourselves indebted to a num-
ber of people. Peter Lauber, who made with us the long train journey to
which we refer at the beginning of our Introduction, is the true instigator of
the idea of women in transit that shapes this book. It was he who encour-
aged us to explore the trope of ‘in transit’ in the first place. This idea, which
had started appropriately in an in- between space, a railway compartment,
would eventually develop into a research project, entitled ‘Women in Spaces
of Transit’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ref.
FFI2008– 01932). We thank the members of the research team for their
enthusiasm and their hard work, and the Spanish institution that provided
financial support. The heading of our second section, ‘The Call of the Wild’,
has been borrowed from Sara Prieto’s unpublished dissertation. We thank
Sara for this as well as for all the technical and scholarly work she has done
within the project ‘Women in Spaces of Transit’. Kaydee Summers and Maite
Muñoz García de Iturrospe are acknowledged for their contributions to Terry
Gifford’s chapter. For Teresa Gómez’s chapter, we wish to thank the trustees
of the Imperial War Museum for having granted us permission to reproduce
copyrighted material. Finally, we are very grateful to Paula Kennedy, Barbara
Slater and to all the good people at Palgrave, including their anonymous
reader, for having helped this book through its latter stages of transit.
x
Notes on Contributors
Anna Despotopoulou is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture
at the University of Athens, Greece. She is co- editor of Henry James and the
Supernatural (2011) and Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and
Cultural Perspectives (2008), and author of articles on Henry James, Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Rhoda Broughton, Joseph Conrad and Peter
Shaffer. Her current research focuses on representations of public and private
space in Victorian and early Modernist literature from a feminist perspective.
Rebecca D’Monté is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of the West
of England, UK. She has edited books on early modern female utopias, and
British political drama in the 1990s. She is currently completing a book on
Second World War theatre, and researching British Drama 1900– 1950 for
Methuen Drama.
Niamh Downing is Associate Lecturer in English and Writing at University
College Falmouth, UK. She has recently completed a PhD at the University of
Exeter. Her thesis, entitled Stratigraphies: Forms of Excavation in Contemporary
British and Irish Poetry, explores the transformation of traditional models
of excavation in the work of Geoffrey Hill, Ciaran Carson, Geraldine Monk
and Alice Oswald. She is currently co- editing a collection of essays on the
poet Alice Oswald.
Valerie Fehlbaum is a member of the English Department at the University
of Geneva, Switzerland, where she specializes in the nineteenth century. She
has also lectured at the University of Neuchatel and tutored with the Open
University. Her primary research interests are Victorian periodicals and
fin- de- siècle literature. Her monograph on Ella Hepworth Dixon was pub-
lished in 2005 and she co- edited a special Ella Hepworth Dixon edition of
Women’s Writing (with Gina O’Brien, 2012). She also contributed a chapter
on Ella Hepworth Dixon to Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle: Making
a Name for Herself (2012).
Terry Gifford is the author of Ted Hughes (2009), Reconnecting with John
Muir: Essays in Post- Pastoral Practice (2006), Pastoral (1999) and Green Voices:
Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (second edition, 2011). He recently
edited The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011). His seventh collection
of poems is (with Christopher North) Al Otro Lado del Aguilar (2011). Terry
Gifford, a member of the Spanish research group GIECO, is Visiting Scholar
at Bath Spa University’s Centre for Writing and Environment, UK, and Senior
Research Fellow and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain.
xi