Blanche Wiesen Cook, Distinguished Professor of History, John Jay College and author of Eleanor Roosevelt, volumes I and II
"Everyone interested in Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Radclyffe Hall will want to read Gay Wachman's splendid book."

From the Back Cover
Gay Wachman provides a critical new reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after the First World War. She contrasts works by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Rose Allatini, and Evadne Price with more politically and narratively conservative novels by Radclyffe Hall and Clemence Dane. These writers, she states, formed part of an alternative modernist tradition that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire, using fantasy as a means of reshaping and critiquing a world fragmented by war. Wachman places at the center of this tradition Sylvia Townsend Warner's achievement in undermining the inhibitions that faced women writing about forbidden love. She discusses Warner's use of crosswriting to transpose the otherwise unrepresentable lives of invisible lesbians into narratives about gay men, destabilizing the borders of race, class, and gender and challenging the codes of expression on which imperialist patriarchy and capitalism depended.

About the Author
Gay Wachman is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York-Old Westbury.

SYNOPSIS

The British lesbian writers examined by Wachman (English, State U. of New York, Old Westbury)—including Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Rose Allatini, Evadne Price, Radclyffe Hall, and Clemence Dane—often used the practice of "crosswriting", or transferring the concerns of lesbians onto narrative characters of gay males, to challenge the repressive Victorian society that they critiqued. This work examines not only their criticisms of gender relations, but also their engagement with larger societal forces such as imperialism and capitalism.