Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 by Anna Snaith (review)

Anna Snaith’s Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945, is a timely study that illuminates colonial women writers’ foundational role in literary modernism and the ways in which their representations of London disrupt imperial claims to stability. Through her paradigm of the “voyage in,” with its playful reversal of Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (1915), Snaith focuses on the unprecedented mobility offered by the ship to demonstrate how colonial women writers shaped modernity: “These women were not coming to London solely to experience modernity, they were a constituent part of it” (26). Modernist Voyages is, in short, a story of reversals: a reversal of the traditional route of imperial expansion from London to the colonies, a reversal of London’s assumed influence on colonial literary production, and a reversal of critical conversations and practices. Modernist Voyages participates in the “spatial turn” within the new modernist studies and yet distinguishes itself by restoring the issue of gender to current debates within the field. Feminist scholars of modernist literature, particularly Jane Garrity and Anne Fernald, have critiqued Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz for their dismissal of sexuality and gender as alternate modes of scholarship in “The New Modernist Studies” (2008). Snaith lends her voice to this debate and poignantly summarizes the problem: “It is as though that primarily recuperative project [on modernist women writers in the 1970s–1990s] is now complete, and critical momentum needs to look elsewhere” (10). Feminist recuperation and “critical momentum” are not mutually exclusive, and Snaith’s refrain of “both . . . and” attempts to address this impasse: these writers were both feminists and anticolonialists, a position that scholars consistently fail to appreciate. Snaith’s deep historical research into the lives of these seven women—Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Sarojini Naidu (India), Sara Jeannette Duncan (Canada), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand), Jean Rhys (Dominica), Una Marson (Jamaica), and Christina Stead (Australia)—raises provocative methodological questions as she gestures toward a more expansive understanding of literary modernism’s terrains.

Uniting the diverse cast of characters in Modernist Voyages are London and the sea, two settings whose importance raises them almost to the status of character in Snaith’s work. In line with Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social production of space, Snaith’s spatial analyses of London trace different topographies that illuminate how various colonies subtend and haunt the unreal city, signaling London’s inherent instability. Instead of reifying London’s position as the facilitator of transnational modernism, then, Snaith’s concentration on these writers’ London years demonstrates how the imperial city fostered both their feminism and anti-imperialism, thus contributing to the destabilization of empire’s ideology. London also epitomizes the criteria by which Snaith designates these writers as “modernist”: “The combined focus on urbanism, capitalism and colonialism in their work constitutes a thoroughgoing consideration of the forms of modernity and its transnational manifestations” (8). In terms of recuperative praxis, finally, the focus on London introduces several writers into the broader category of transnational modernism. For instance, until now Sara Jeannette Duncan and Una Marson have primarily been discussed in the context of either Canadian or Jamaican literature, subordinating each writer’s cosmopolitanism to her national origins.

Snaith’s remapping of London is compelling, but her emphasis on the sea as a facilitator of a distinctly feminist transnational modernism proves her most significant accomplishment. Employing Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia from “Of Other Spaces” (1984), she argues that the ship represents a place moving through a hegemonic space and creating a space of resistance. Snaith highlights both the sea’s formative role in each woman’s career and scholars’ tendency to concentrate exclusively on male exiles and their modernist voyages, from James Joyce to V. S. Naipaul. For instance, both Una Marson and C. L. R. James traveled from Jamaica to London in 1932 and both moved within the same literary and political circles in London, yet Marson often remains a footnote in our understanding of transnational modernism...