Abstract

In volume one of this revisionary study of modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott focuses on the literary and cultural contexts that shaped the professional and creative development of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Djuna Barnes: gifted parents and dysfunctional families; their attachments to the celebrated modernism of the Men of 1914; Edwardian uncles who commanded the publishing world while dabbling in the sexual liberation of the new woman; and the suffrage movement. Scott argues that Woolf, West, and Barnes emerged with their own distinct personal arrangements and literary concerns in a second flourishing of modernism, the Women of 1928 the hallmarks of which were Woolf's Orlando, West's The Strange Necessity, Barnes's Ryder and Ladies Almanack, and their responses to the landmark censorship trial of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Aware of the nature of literary markets on both sides of the Atlantic, and of personal and sexual needs, these authors devised corresponding professional and personal arrangements. Scott's contextual approach is based upon fresh archival explorations and, in addition, takes on the challenge of combining postmodern with femi.