Table Of ContentA Space of Their Own
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 study, nineteenth-century writing and
early twentieth-century/modernist writing, so it enables discussion of how
ideas of space progressed alongside changes in styles of writing. It looks
to the many ways women writers explored concepts of space and place
and how they expressed these through their writings, for example, how
they interpreted both urban and rural landscapes and how they presented
domestic spaces.
A Space of Their Own will be of interest to those studying Victorian
literature and modernist works as it covers a period of immense change
for women’s rights in society. It is also not limited to just one type or
definition of ‘space’. Therefore, it may also be of interest to academics
outside of literature – for example, in gender studies, cultural geography,
place writing and digital humanities.
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.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature, art, and
culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social, technological,
and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians and Modernists.
Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and cultural debates
and movements; influential figures and communities; and agitations
and developments regarding subjects such as animals, commodification,
decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender, nationalism,
the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spiritualities,
transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continuities between
the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent responses to
the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and film will also
be considered.
Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End
Edited by Diana Maltz
Writers at War
Exploring the Prose of Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Siegfried Sassoon
and Mary Borden
Isabelle Brasme
Hotel Modernisms
Edited by Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi
Legal Narratives in Victorian Fiction
Joanne Bridget Simpson
A Space of Their Own
Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950
Edited by Katie Baker and Naomi Walker
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www .routledge
.com/ Among- the -Victorians -and- Modernists/ book- series/ ASHSER4035
A Space of Their Own
Women, Writing and Place 1850–1950
Edited by Katie Baker and
Naomi Walker
First published 2023
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Katie Baker and Naomi Walker;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Katie Baker and Naomi Walker to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-21809-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-21810-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27010-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003270102
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by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
KATIE BAKER AND NAOMI WALKER
PART 1
Women writing the domestic space 15
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 17
KATIE BAKER
2 ‘The room I sit in’: Women’s refashioning of the
drawing-room in fin-de-siècle and modernist writing 29
EMMA LIGGINS
3 ‘Fleece in the hedge’: Domesticity and depiction among
women writers of the interwar years 44
GERALDINE PERRIAM
PART 2
Women writing the rural space 59
4 Mountains, therapy, and the peripatetic writing space:
Elizabeth Le Blond in France and Switzerland in the 1880s 61
KATHRYN WALCHESTER
vi Contents
5 Walking and writing the rural: Mary Webb and the
Shropshire landscape 74
NAOMI WALKER
6 Spangin’ and stravaiging: Scottish women writers and
the nature of rural modernity 87
HELENA DUNCAN
PART 3
Women writing the public space 101
7 ‘There’s London!’: Spatial affects and urban
environments in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s: The Story of a
Modern Woman 103
CIGDEM TALU
8 Utopian spaces, public places: Considering the perils
and pleasures of crossing domestic thresholds in The
Women’s Side and The More I See of Men 114
LOUISE MCDONALD
PART 4
Women writing new interpretations of space 127
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 129
JOSIE BILLINGTON
10 R. A. Kartini and the many faces of colonial female
subject: Domestic cosmopolitanism in colonial Indonesia 143
SILVIA MAYASARI-HOFFERT
11 Spatial and sensory aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando (1928) 158
ANNIE STRAUSA
Conclusion 171
KATIE BAKER AND NAOMI WALKER
Index 173
Notes on contributors
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 writ-
ers. She has published on Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant and
is currently an independent researcher.
Josie Billington is Professor in English Literature at the University of
Liverpool. She has published extensively on Victorian women writers –
including Faithful Realism (2002), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2007)
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012) – and produced
scholarly editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (2006),
Margaret Oliphant’s Novellas (2013) and The Ladies Lindores (2016),
George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (2015) and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning: 21st Century Oxford Authors (2018). Her recent publications
include Is Literature Healthy? (2016) and Reading and Mental Health
(ed. 2020). She is currently writing a monograph on Literature and Pain
for Bloomsbury.
Helena Duncan is currently studying part-time for her PhD at Edinburgh
Napier University, where she is researching early twentieth-century
Scottish women’s writing and rural modernity with a focus on the writ-
ing of Willa Muir, Lorna Moon and Nan Shepherd. Helena has previ-
ously lead tutorials in two Undergraduate English Literature modules
at Edinburgh Napier, and she has presented work at conferences across
the UK as well as internationally. She is particularly interested in rural
watchfulness, the tensions between tradition and modernity in interwar
women’s writing and the ‘stravaiger’ as a rural, Scottish alternative to the
flâneur figure.
Emma Liggins is Reader in English Literature in the Department of English
at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include George
Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Ashgate, 2006), The
British Short Story (with Andrew Maunder & Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave,
2011), Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British
viii Notes on contributors
Women’s Fiction, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2014) and
The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and
Modernity, 1850-1945 (Palgrave, 2020). She has also published an arti-
cle on Vernon Lee and the supernatural in Gothic Studies (2013). She
has a chapter on modernist women’s ghost stories in British Women
Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now, eds. Emma Young and
James Bailey (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and a chapter on ‘The
Edwardian Supernatural’ in Twentieth-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh
Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert is a Lecturer in Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe
University Frankfurt, Germany, where she obtained her PhD. Her
research interests concern the role of literature and culture in socio-polit-
ical life, power relations and post-colonialism. Her research on memory
(re-)construction in Indonesian literary expressions after 1965 has been
published as book chapters in Literature Education in the Asia-Pacific
(Routledge, 2018) and Subaltern Women’s Narratives: Strident Voices,
Dissenting Bodies (Routledge, 2021).
Louise McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in English at Newman University.
Her main research interest is middlebrow women’s literature, 1900–
1965. She has published widely on the work of middlebrow writer
Clemence Dane and is the author of Clemence Dane: Forgotten Feminist
Writer of the Inter-War Years (London: Routledge 2020). She also has
a research interest in film adaptation studies, particularly cinematic ver-
sions of Victorian novels. Her publications in this field include essays on
Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and cin-
ematic versions of George Du Maurier’s Trilby. She is currently working
as the guest editor of an upcoming Special Issue of Humanities entitled
‘Adapting Fiction into Visual Culture’.
Geraldine Perriam is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and is also
Vice-Chair of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. Her research explores the
work and lives of women writers of the first half of the twentieth century
with particular focus on the interwar years. Publications include work
on Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers and Angela
Thirkell. As well as investigating themes of gender and place, Geraldine
examines the professional lives of women authors and the circulation
and reception of their texts. Other areas of research include therapeutic
landscapes, data analysis of women in the twenty-first century workplace
and crime fiction. Her background in teaching has been put to good use
developing writing programmes for undergraduates and training post-
graduates in research methods.
Annie Strausa is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. Her project
is also supported by Cardiff University and funded by the South West
Notes on contributors ix
and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Annie was elected as the first
Graduate Student Representative for the Modernist Studies Association
(MSA) in 2020. Her work explores the intersection between feminist
modernist studies and sensory studies. She is especially interested in
twentieth-century women writers, feminist theory, gender studies, criti-
cal race theory and experimental literature. Her thesis focuses on work
by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor and Naomi Mitchison. She is cur-
rently writing a chapter for a new collection of essays on Gloria Naylor’s
archives.
Cigdem Talu is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at McGill
University. Her dissertation focuses on women’s experience in nine-
teenth-century London, the concept of urban atmospheres, the history of
emotions and urban travel writing. She also works on American writer
Shirley Jackson’s life and novels analysed through architecture, and
female agency and set design in 1960s and 1970s horror cinema. Her
research is supported by the Bombardier Graduate Scholarship from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She holds
B.Arch, M.Arch and post-professional M.Arch degrees from Politecnico
di Milano and McGill University.
Kathryn Walchester is Reader and Subject Leader for English Literature at
Liverpool John Moores University. She has published widely on wom-
en’s European travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, north-
ern travel and mountaineering. Her publications include Gamle Norge
and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway (Anthem,
2014), Travelling Servants: Mobility and Employment in British Fiction
and Travel Writing 1750-1850 (Routledge, 2019) and Keywords for
Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary, co-edited with Charles
Forsdick and Zoë Kinsley (Anthem 2019).
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.
