The History of British Women's Writing, 1920-1945

The historical period from 1920 to 1945 is coterminous with the great achievements of literary Modernism dating approximately from the annus mirabilis of 1922, which saw T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, to the publication of Joyce's Finnegans Wake at the apex of 'high Modernism' in 1939. The majority of women whose work is discussed in volume eight of The History of British Women's Writing series do not fit into a recognized version of the modernist canon. Their complex and often troubled relationship to modernity – as readers, consumers, and travellers at home and abroad – requires new critical frameworks in which to discuss their writing as well as a revision of the territory that has been staked out as the preserve of Modernism by critical theory and practice.
This book, now available in paperback, serves as a superb new mapping and overview of women's writing between the two world wars written by leading scholars from Britain and the United States. Topics range from the feminine middlebrow novel to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to best-selling crime fiction, from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales and poetry in small magazines.

Mary Joannou is Professor of Literary History and Women's Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of'Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows': Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918-1938 andContemporary Women's Writing: From the Golden Notebook to the Colour Purple. She editedWomen Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History.