A Narrative of their Own: Introduction

Discussions on 20th century women writers and their relevance in today's culture

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In September 1929, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), published her extended essay A Room of One’s Own, originally written as two lectures given at Newnham and Girton women’s colleges at Cambridge University on the topic of ‘Women and Fiction’.

The essay’s main premise is that a woman must have her own money and a room of her own if she is to write.  Delivered through the voice of ‘Mary’, Woolf’s siren call was directed at women writers in an era which saw women’s creativity curtailed by their financial, social, and educational disadvantages.  To support her theory, Woolf suggests that women have been traditionally marginalised, seen as inferior writers and artists due to the nature of literature and history being a male construct. 

To illustrate her point, Woolf entertainingly introduces a hypothetical sister to William Shakespeare, ‘Judith’, who is talented but uneducated.  Due to her constant discouragement and lack of available outlets for her creativity, and the demands of repeated mundane domestic tasks, Woolf’s invented Judith sadly takes her own life. 

Though Woolf goes on to celebrate the women who have bucked this trend, including the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and George Eliot, she continues to argue that financial freedom and domestic drudgery hampers women’s attempts to write.  Further, due to an issue of gendered values, she suggests that men’s books were routinely seen as ‘important’ tracts on subjects such as war, whereas women’s writing dealing with domestic situations were seen as insignificant. 

Woolf’s feminist critique within A Room of One’s Own is written in Woolf’s lively, conversational, modernist prose for which her novels are famous.  A member of the famous ‘Bloomsbury Group’, which included Woolf’s sister the artist Vanessa Bell, and writer Lytton Strachey, Woolf ends her call to women writers to ‘write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast’. 

Woolf’s text gave me the idea for the name of this newsletter, since I have spent the past couple of years researching the narratives of 20th Century women writers, both well published and virtually unknown.  Through this research, I have come to understand Woolf’s essay on a deeper level. 

Reading and researching women’s narratives from WW1, it became clear that stories written by women based both on the domestic front, and as war correspondents and nurses on the frontline, brought a new understanding of the depths of human responses to war.  Throughout history, all types of writing by all types of people have allowed for a more nuanced viewpoint from which to understand life and culture.

So, I come to my idea to set up this newsletter.  I want to continue to research the extensive range of 20th Century women’s writing and the often controversial, subversive and original ideas and themes they explored.  Further, I want to see how these women shaped some of the ways we see our present experience in the world and the lasting effects their work has had, as well as explore the relevance of modernist ideas on our present situation as human citizens.

Modernism in literature circles is often referred to primarily as the era following WW1, though some texts prior to this fall within the themes, style and tropes of modernist writing.  It often reflects the disillusionment of this period, referencing ‘the lost generation’, as well as the proposed fragmentation of society, and unlike the wordy narratives of the 19th Century, its opaque allusions and imagery allowed for a more active role on behalf of the reader to interpret its meanings.

Modernist stylistics developed from these new ways of writing and creating narratives, most famously perhaps the stream of consciousness prose developed by writers such as William Faulkner, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.  Gone were the dominant all-seeing omnipresent narrators of the previous century’s novels.  In their place were fragmented texts often delivered through the narration of a single character, ignoring traditional rules of sentence structure and allowing for a representation of the central character’s thoughts and ideas.  Dreams, ruptured prose and the use of the epiphany were other common practices employed within modernist literature, causing consternation for more traditionalist critics.

Over the next few months, I shall be looking at some of the women pioneers of this new literary movement, as well as some lesser-known writers who seemingly fell into relative obscurity.  I want to explore the work of some of the women of the Beat Generation, of which male writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were famous.  I shall unpick ideas around femininity, masculinity and androgyny within literary texts, as well as the changing roles of women within 20th century society.  Importantly, I want to investigate how these changing ideas and roles play into our lives now; how they help us to understand ourselves and our environments better.

I would love it if you would join me on this odyssey of women’s 20th century writing.  I plan to research and publish at least one newsletter per month around these topics, as well as sharing writing, reviews or relevant content I come across during my research.

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