Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf by Claire Drewery (review)

This ambitious but uneven study brings deserved critical attention to an overlooked body of works; as Claire Drewery rightly argues in her introduction, the primary texts she has selected have suffered a double neglect both within each authors' oeuvre and in modernist studies because they belonged to a genre, the short story, too often relegated to the margins of literary history and criticism. Drewery ably connects Victor Turner's and Arnold van Gennep's theories of the liminal as an "uncomfortable yet subversive condition," with the modernist short story as a genre most suited to represent and embody liminality because of its "experimental form," which is characterized by elliptical style, fragmentary syntax, and refusal of narrative closure (pp. 1, 13).

Each chapter is organized around a broad theme or type of liminality with brief close readings of representative stories from some of the writers under study. The first chapter focuses on journey or pilgrimage in stories, such as Katherine Mansfield's "The Little Governess" (1915) and Dorothy Richardson's "Tryst" (1941), and as metaphor or "liminal trope" to emphasize the elusive and illusory epiphanies emerging from transitory states (p. 17). Chapter 2 deals with the impossibility of mourning as liminal state in well-known stories by Virginia Woolf ("Kew Gardens," 1919) and Mansfield ("Life of Ma Parker," 1921; "Daughters of the Late Colonel," 1922; and "The Fly," 1922). The third chapter centers on the act of dying as a paradoxical phenomenon in Mansfield, Richardson, and May Sinclair, and argues that the prevalence of death as an "uncanny yet familiar and intrinsic condition of life" in modernist short fiction is connected with liminality as thematic preoccupation (p. 51). In the fourth chapter, Drewery reads ghost stories by Sinclair and Woolf as texts that bridge the Gothic tradition with modernist themes by mixing psychoanalysis and mysticism. The inner life, subjectivity, and the limits of linguistic representation of liminal moments of being in Mansfield, Richardson, and Woolf anchor the fifth chapter, which includes a review of Richardson's and Woolf's problems with the term "stream of consciousness" as most appropriate to define their preferred narrative techniques. The last chapter centers on the modernist epiphany as secular, paradoxical, and rooted in the everyday in Mansfield's "Bliss" (1920), Sinclair's "If the Dead Knew" (1923), and Woolf's "An Unwritten Novel" (1920).

The main drawbacks of this book lie in its (dis)organization, over-reliance on theorists, and editing. Despite broad connections—each chapter deals with modernist short fiction, women writers, and liminality—the chapters read like discrete units rather than parts of a sustained and unified argument. Many individual analyses of intriguing works make for compelling reading, but the chapters themselves often lack internal cohesion and it is not always clear why particular stories or authors are treated under one thematic strand and not another. Moreover, the book's main focus on liminality and fictional form is often sidelined by incursions from critical theorists, ranging from the useful and relevant (Sigmund Freud and his "The 'Uncanny,'" Mary Douglas and her Purity and Danger, and the increasingly ubiquitous Henri Bergson), to the more gratuitous cameos (Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler), with extended digressions on Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde as precursors or influences.¹ While at times helpful to contextualize an interpretation, these (too) frequent theoretical "assists" contribute little to the book's main theoretical framework and numerous insights. Lastly, small but distracting editing flaws, such as unnecessary repetitions between chapters and many typographical errors, hint at a rushed process from manuscript to print.

At its best, Modernist Short Fiction by Women introduces unfamiliar texts and revisits familiar ones with a keen attention to telling details, both thematic and stylistic, and makes a compelling case for the usefulness of reading modernist authors...