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

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 1-19

3. Reconfiguring Domestic Space for Female Privacy: the Garden, the Study and the Room

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 20-46

4. Public Privacy: Women, the City and the Car

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 47-75

5. Privileging Privacy: the Pre-Modern Role Models of the Witch and the Primitive

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 76-103

6. ‘We Have Gone Recreation-mad’: Leisure, Privacy and Modern Domestic Identity

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 104-129

7. The Loss of a Private World: Women, Privacy and Novels of Adultery

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 130-157

8. Conclusion

   • Wendy Gan

   Pages 158-162

9. Back Matter

   Pages 163-180

   PDF

Privacy is not often thought of as a marker of modernity but a look at British women's writing of the early twentieth century suggests that it should be so. This book examines the female pursuit of privacy, particularly of the spatial kind, as women began to claim privacy as an entitlement of the modern, middle-class woman.

• 20th century
• bibliography
• identity
• knowledge
• model
• novel
• space
• twentieth century
• women
• writing
• British and Irish Literature

'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

• School of English, University of Hong Kong, China

  Wendy Gan

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

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