Narrative Settlements: Geographies of British Women's Fiction between the Wars

During the interwar period, shifting attitudes toward empire dovetailed with women's achievement of citizenship, placing women at the centre of debates about what England would be. Responding to these cultural conditions, women writers used novels of place to analyze relationships among space, self, and nation in England, thereby establishing new ways for the country to view itself.

Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt's Narrative Settlements resituates British women's writing between the wars in light of postcolonial theories of the novel and feminist geography. Reading works by Winifred Holtby, Vita Sackville-West, Angela Thirkell, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Nesbitt argues that renewed attention to setting provides a methodological base for a more nuanced understanding of the aesthetic preoccupations of women writers between the wars. She provides not only attentive readings of literature during this contentious time, but a convincing argument for looking beyond modernism to locate the significance of interwar literary production.