Moments of Truth: Twelve Twentieth-Century Women Writers

Description

Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Christina Stead, Djuna Barnes, Violet Trefusis, Jane Bowles, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Brooke-Rose, Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter. Women who moved in literary circles in the first half of the 20th century were "helpmeets or patrons, muses or mistresses, not artists in their own right". All the writers above struggled, in different ways, to discover their own "voice" while being faced with stifling conceptions of feminine creativity. Lorna Sage discovers in these women's writings, the revelatory moment when each one locates her distinctive voice, finds her calling (or fails to), or refashions herself as an author. Most of these writers are now canonized, others remain on the fringes of our attention. All of them had trouble inventing themselves, and some did it more than once. Virginia Woolf, in her early fiction, was freeing herself from the accumulated meanings that literary tradition had loaded on to young women; Katherine Mansfield in her gem-like short stories transforms her experiences of displacement and impermanence into the very substance of her work. Djuna Barnes who produced one masterpiece, "Nightwood", felt that her originality exiled her in singularity. "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir, the only piece of non-fiction covered in the book, is read as an anti-fiction, devoted to demolishing myths about feminine character and destiny. Other writers never found themselves a home - Violet Trefusis's stylish comedies which dissect the heart of extraordinary privilege to reveal unfreedom, mocked her own talent and are now seldom remembered. This book looks at the process by which particular books - and whole writing lives - materialized against the odds. This collection of highly accessible essays on the most influential women writers of the first half of the last century is a mixture of close reading with a sensitivity to nuances, and biographical exploration.

Lorna Sage was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia. Her previous books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, and a short monograph on Angela Carter. Lorna Sage died in Januray 2001

'She shoots from the hip with a cigarette in one hand, and charms us with her silvery wit. More importantly, her gift to us is that she is herself such an astute reader.' Deborah Levy, Independent 'Strong and supple enough to loop together all her dancing ideas. Like Adriadne unrolling her ball of string, she guides us into the labyrinth, this time the one with the modernist epiphany at its heart.' Michele Roberts, Independent on Sunday 'She writes brilliantly...Lorna Sage seems to be coming to her own moment of truth in these essays, rejecting the critical dogma of the "death of the author" on which she had been nurtured and finding the courage to write in her own voice.' Elaine Showalter, The Times