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Jane Garrity. Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary. New York: Manchester UP, 2003. x + 349 pp.
Jane Garrity's Step-daughters of England exammes how, despite their frequent ambivalence toward, and even overt resistance to, the British imperial project, four British women writers of the years between the world wars nonetheless remained deeply influenced by the logic and rhetoric of Empire. According to Garrity, these writers were compelled by a love of England as well as a desire to inscribe themselves as citizens of the nation as women had not hitherto been able to do, even as they were acutely critical of many facets of life in contemporary England-especially of their situation as women within its systems. And their investment in the cultural mythology of England, as well as their acculturation within the "infrastructure of Englishness" (23), sometimes led them unwittingly to speak the language of Empire. Garrity illuminates how these British women modernists' "experience of nation" and "complicated relation" to imperialist structures of feeling marked their work (1, 11).
Of the British women writers that Garrity treats, Woolf is the clearly canonical figure here, while Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Mary Butts are included with the acknowledgment that they are "critically neglected" and undervalued (13). She seeks to recuperate these last three from marginality. These writers also represent a range of different relationships to the category of modernism: whereas Woolf and Richardson, given their formal strategies and thematic concerns, are readily classified as modernist, Butts is not often invoked in discussions of modernism because she is usually simply absent from the radar screen of twentieth-century literature; Warner, when addressed, is often denied modernist status on grounds of her formally conservative prose idiom. Garrity reads all these writers as modernist, and she maintains that modernist experimental fiction by British women writers forms a prime locus for the phenomenon she examines.
Garrity suggests that these early-twentieth-century women writers, actuated by awareness of the injustice of the position of British women (who remained politically disempowered despite such recent...