Abstract

Word of Mouth focuses on the two most prominent women in British modernism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Both wrote with an extraordinary and sometimes celebratory self-consciousness about their status as "women writers". At odds with their explicit privileging of female difference, however, are patterns of imagery that demonstrate self-revulsion and self-hatred, the woman writer's rejection of herself. Patricia Moran points out that strategies of resistance and challenge are also strategies of repudiation and revulsion directed at female embodiment. Word of Mouth reevaluates Mansfield and Woolf, focusing on the figures of the anorexic and the hysteric and on the extensive imagery of eating, feeding, starvation, suffocation, flesh, and longing that permeates both fictional and nonfictional texts; it locates this writing within the overlapping frames of psychoanalytic theory, studies of women and eating disorders, and feminist work on women's anxiety of authorship.