I’m a Woman Experimental Writer … Get Me Out of Here!

The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.

The Afterword reflects both on the contributions to this collection as well as the question of why avant-garde women’s writing is currently enjoying a marked resurgence of interest. Looking back from the twenty-first century, Sweeney asks what reasons we can pinpoint for the historical neglect of the authors discussed in this volume and what key factors are at play in “rediscovering” them in the present moment.