ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies cross-period intertexts made possible by one type of historical family unit in Britain, the multigenerational feminist family. It examines the catalyzing roles of such families, arguing that they were lively hubs in authors’ networks that bridged Victorian and modernist literary cultures. It focuses on how sapphic fiction and drama by Dorothy Bussy engages with the writing of Bussy’s feminist family, the Stracheys, and the work created in communities close to them. Concerned with women’s intellectual and sexual agency, Bussy’s writing is in dialogue with her family’s pursuits as it pays homage to and builds on Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and fiction by Colette and Virginia Woolf. Together, they contributed to the development of female same-sex desire as a concept running through linked literary networks. The interplay among Bussy, the Stracheys, and other authors of several generations indicate some of the ways familial dynamics became integral to the production of literature in the early twentieth century, when writers were occupied with questions of continuity and change between the later nineteenth century and their own time.
