Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing

WENDY GAN is Associate Professor at the School of English, University of Hong Kong.

'Wendy Gan's monograph explores how early twentieth-century representations of female privacy encourage a rethinking of modernity. Among the literary texts examined are novels by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Walker and F. Tennyson Jesse. Gan argues that whilst the autonomy of the modern subject is often presented as predicated on emphatic intervention in the public sphere, this elides the importance to the process o cultural production of the women who did not or could not leave the domestic environment. To redress the balance, focus is shifted from male flanerie to a variety of interiors. Gan demonstrates how the privacy of physical spaces, such as those provided by the rented room and the motorcar, and psycholgical retreats, such as those opened up by novels that posited alternative versions of feminine identity in the pre-modern models of the witch and the primitive...' - Routledge ABES June 20 1 1

• Acknowledgements Introduction Reconfiguring Domestic Space for Female Privacy: The Garden, the Study, and the Room Public Privacy: Women, the City, and the Car Privileging Privacy: The Pre-modern Role Models of the Witch and the Primitive 'We Have Gone Recreation Mad': Leisure, Privacy, and Modern Domestic Identity The Loss of a Private World: Women, Privacy, and Novels of Adultery Conclusion Endnotes Bibliography Index