1st Edition

A Space of Their Own Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950

Edited By Katie Baker, Naomi Walker Copyright 2023
190 Pages
by Routledge

190 Pages
by Routledge

190 Pages
by Routledge

This collection explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers incorporated the idea of ‘place’ into their writing. Whether writing from a specific location or focusing upon a particular geographical or imaginary place, women writers working between 1850 and 1950 valued ‘a space of their own’ in which to work. The period on which this collection focuses straddles two main areas of... Read more

Introduction – Dr. Katie Baker and Dr. Naomi Walker

 

Part 1 – Women Writing the Domestic Space

Chapter 1 – ‘It is home, and I can’t put its charm into words’ (Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South): Radically Extending Domesticity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Dr. Katie Baker

Chapter 2 – ‘The Room I sit in’: Women’s Refashioning of the Drawing-Room in Fin-de-Siècle and Modernist Writing

Dr. Emma Liggins

Chapter 3 – ‘Fleece in the hedge’: Domesticity and Depiction among Women Writers of the Interwar Years

Dr. Geraldine Perriam

Part 2 – Women Writing the Rural Space

Chapter 4 – Mountains, Therapy and the Peripatetic Writing Space: Elizabeth le Blond in France and Switzerland in the 1880s

Dr. Kathryn Walchester

Chapter 5 – Walking and Writing the Rural: Mary Webb and the Shropshire Landscape

Dr. Naomi Walker

Chapter 6 – Spangin’ and Stravaiging: Scottish Women Writers and the Nature of Rural Modernity

Helena Duncan

 

 

 

Part 3 – Women Writing the Public Space

Chapter 7 – ‘There’s London!’: Spatial affects and urban environments in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman

Cigdem Talu

Chapter 8 – Utopian spaces, public places: considering the perils and pleasures of crossing domestic thresholds in The Woman’s Side and The More I See of Men

Dr. Louise McDonald

Part 4 – Women Writing New Interpretations of Space

Chapter 9 – ‘Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her’ (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda): Lyric Space in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing.

Professor Josie Billington

Chapter 10 – R. A. Kartini and the Many Faces of Colonial Female Subject: Domestic Cosmopolitanism in Colonial Indonesia

Dr. Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert

Chapter 11 – Spatial and Sensory Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928)

Annie Strausa

Conclusion – Dr. Katie Baker and Dr. Naomi Walker

Biography

Katie Baker was awarded a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chester in 2018. Her research focuses on female sexuality, domesticity and the 'businesswoman' in the work of nineteenth-century women writers. She has published on Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant and is currently an independent researcher.

Naomi Walker is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. Her PhD research was based on the two Shropshire feminist writers, Mary Webb (1881–1927) and Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925), and she used GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software to plot their lives and works within the Shropshire area.