Narrative Settlements: Geographies of British Women's Fiction Between the Wars

Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt begins her examination of the intersection of home, geography, and identity in British women's writing between World War I and II with the premise that "[i]magining a home is as political as imagining a nation" (p. 8). In so doing, Nesbitt pays direct tribute to Rosemary Marangoly George's sweeping study, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (1999). Nesbitt's work "participates in detailing" George's larger canvas by focusing on a cross-section of experimental and critically neglected feminist women's literature published between 1918 and 1936 and resituates their narratives in light of postcolonial and geographical studies (p. 111 n. 4). Nesbitt argues that "particular settings are synechdoches for the 'imagined community' of the British nation, representing, in miniature, the naturalization of the nation of England as a clearly 'limited and sovereign' space through the traditions of literary convention" (p. 6).

One of the most provocative aspects of Nesbitt's critical study is her organizational pairing of complementary texts in each successive chapter. The connections and antagonisms forged across these paired texts create a dialogue that foregrounds the mutual anxieties these authors faced in thinking about subjectivity, gender, setting, and narrative within the context of a post-World War I, imperial Britain in decline. For example, the pairing of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Vita Sackville-West's The Edwardians illustrates an engaged dispute in fictional terms between these two friends about the legitimacy of the sociopolitical tradition of great English country estates. In Orlando, according to Nesbitt, Woolf recognizes "the impoverishment of other classes historically required to maintain" the space of the country house, and she presents it as a "frightening vision of spatialized privilege" (p. 49). Sackville-West, who was barred by gender discrimination from inheriting her beloved ancestral estate, Knole, responds to Woolf in The Edwardians by trying to find a way to maintain the country house tradition without its reliance upon patriarchal succession and heterosexual privilege. The remaining chapters of Narrative Settlements couple Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Rebecca West's Harriet Hume on the city, Winifred Holtby's Mandoa! Mandoa! and Sylvia Warner's Mr. Fortune's Maggot on the colonized space, and finally Holtby's South Riding and Angela Thirkell's early Barcetshire novels on the city/country bifurcation represented in regional fiction. These novelists' shared concern with postwar feminism, sexuality, nationalism, and space reinforces Nesbitt's claims for further critical attention to the relationship between setting, politics, and identity in these texts.

While the focus on space and subjectivity in Narrative Settlements provides a promising angle of insight into these often-neglected novels, I wished at times that Nesbitt had been bolder in stepping back to evaluate the texts themselves in relation to her larger argument. Too often she describes the politics of a text without asking why and in what context a particular narrative ideology matters. Her "Epilogue," which concludes, "The women writers I examine in this study negotiate the spatial affect produced by miniature Englands by writing within and against the conventional expectations" (p. 110), does not take readers very far. Nesbitt backs off further to state in the final sentence of the book that her project "makes no claim to settle the question of women writers, space, and national identity" (p. 110). She does, however, nod to what the ultimate stakes of this argument might be, claiming that current postcolonial evaluations of the interwar period "limit themselves to established texts" and thus "reify an understanding of 'significant' literary production that skews our understanding of the novel's relationship to imperialism and nationalism during the interwar years" (p. 110). This is indeed a fascinating and significant issue. Unfortunately, Nesbitt never relates what these established texts are, what the reified understanding is, or how this distorts our knowledge of the novel's relationship to British imperialism in this period. If this is where Nesbitt's real interest lies, I look forward to her future work that may provide a sharper argument about the value of these women's novels in suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the interwar years and narrative conventions.