Examines British women’s experimental writing in historical contexts, 1945–1970
The first detailed literary history of women’s experimental writing in post-war BritainProvides a detailed historical overview combined with close critical readings and complemented by an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sourcesConsiders literature in changing cultural and technological contexts of production through the BBC, the Arts Council, and avant garde publishing housesOffers detailed biographical information on each writer based on original archival research carried out in the British Library and at the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas
Filling in a blank spot in the history of twentieth-century women’s writing, Carole Sweeney examines the work of five experimental writers, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes and Ann Quin, whose writing has been neglected in accounts of the development of post-1945 British literature. Each of these writers, Sweeney argues, engaged in diverse formal experiments that challenge the critical commonplace suggesting that after the end of aesthetic modernism the mid-century British novel was characterised by a wholesale return to realism. Avoiding any insistence on a straightforward opposition between literary realism and experimentalism, this study draws upon original archival and biographical material and offers close readings of the creative and critical work of these ‘vagabond’ writers, demonstrating how they wrote against aesthetic and thematic conventions of their times and negotiated (and often repudiated) concepts of ‘feminine’ writing.