ABSTRACT
Drawing on current research on different sites of Modernism(s), new archival sources in Woolf studies, and critical urban theory, this chapter explores the experimental textual strategies used by the Modernist writer Virginia Woolf to capture the impact of urbanization and industrialization on the historical hinterland and landscapes of Sussex. It begins with an overview of the Bloomsbury's Group activities in Sussex and interwar changes in housing, followed by a discussion of critical approaches to the transformation of hinterland territories. Then, the chapter focuses on Woolf's epistolary exchanges, letter-essays, and fictional works that offer not only the representation of imagined hinterland but also the critique of building developments and industrial sites in Sussex. It demonstrates that Woolf gestures toward hybridity and modernist irony while accurately capturing the processes that eventually transformed the areas adjacent to the writer's houses in Sussex into an operational landscape of waste.
