ABSTRACT
Olive Moore is both a mystery and a conundrum. As a working-class, second-generation, female modernist writer, her life and work reveal her struggle with what it means to be a modern woman and resituate established modernist writers and their culture, such as Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury. Vaughan published four books in rapid succession under her pen name Olive Moore: three novels, Celestial Seraglio in 1929, Spleen in 1930, and Fugue in 1932, and one collection of aphorisms or “notebooks,” The Apple is Bitten Again, in 1934. Fugue, her third novel, may provide the best lens with which to view Moore’s continued evolution and struggle to define the modern woman. In music, “fugue” is a composition in which “a succession of notes in one part is taken over in another part, with due regard for the mode, and especially for the position of whole-and half-tone steps.”
