ABSTRACT

Bonnie Kime Scott’s two-volume study of modernism has great ambitions, but exactly what they are is difficult to specify. The title, The Women of 1928, marks Volume 1 as some sort of response to Wyndham Lewis’s phrase, ‘the men of 1914’, and both volumes can be taken as a reply to studies devoted to those men, such as Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. That masculine version of high modernism is particularly suited to narrative and biographical exposition because Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Lewis were each crucial presences in the others’ histories, and in each other’s works, as Dennis Brown’s Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group showed. In setting up her alternative grouping, Scott faces the difficulty that there are no comparable connections among her trio of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West and Djuna Barnes. They had almost nothing to do with each other apart from a minimal, uneasy relationship between West and Woolf. This would not matter if Scott had not chosen a biographical approach for her first volume. But she wishes to trace the ‘web’ or network of mutual support and connection from which her writers were able to make a ‘leap’ into their own version of modernism-‘to haul in beauty and life’, as Scott puts it, in a characteristically ungainly phrase.