ABSTRACT
I would like to begin by disrupting expectations-the kind of strategy that is itself characteristic of modernist essays-by setting for the reader a small puzzle, a guessing game. I call it uName the Modernist." Here are the clues:
She was a British novelist working from 1910 to 1940 and beyond in an experimental vein, exploring the consciousnesses of female subjects against a backdrop of London life. She was an ardent supporter of women's suffrage and an even more vocal proponent of women's economic independence and free access to culture. She was a commentator upon political and literary life who meditated deeply and often on matters of war and peace. Most of all, she was a self-supporting writer of critical essays and reviews, and produced some of the earliest favorable studies of Joyce, Proust, and Lawrence, as well as explorations of the philosophy behind modernist techniques. She appreciated tradition, especially the female tradition in literature, and she asserted that "there is one English novel which can be classed with Shakespeare's plays, and that is Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights" (Court 90). But she also advocated the new. In 1930, she publicly defended the modems and their abandonment of realism as a method against the attacks of self-described uhumanists" such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, writing that
disturb" through a version of modernist stylet combining linear argument with nonlinear sequences of images and impressions, using techniques of juxtaposition and discordance, and employing a voice at once personal and playful, capable of assuming a variety of personae. In the 1920s and 1930s1 these essays-which appeared in the Bookman, Saturday Review, Outlook, New Statesman, and other mainstream journals with large circulations-were widely read and were seen as issuing from the center of cultural opinion. The author herself, moreover, despite her own readiness to identify with politically marginal and oppressed outsiders, was percei\"ed by others as an insider, enjoying a large circle of influential friends and contacts based in London, from the vorticists at Blast to the feministv socialists at Time and Tide ..
