Modernist Short Stories by Women

Claire Drewery's Modernist Short Fiction by Women makes a number of very valuable critical moves, all of which allow for the opportunity to pay attention to aspects of modernist literature that often go overlooked. And I say "pay attention to" deliberately: part of Drewery's project is to show how the fleeting moments of ordinary life, shifts in consciousness, and uncanny in-betweennesses form the subjects of modern short fiction. If you weren't paying attention, you'd miss the illuminating moments the writers gathered here offer up; you'd miss the finely wrought short pieces that form the substance of their work and the vessels for their reflections; you'd miss the women themselves for more boisterous figures of the period.

For Modernist Short Fiction by Women is a work that does not so much reclaim the genre of the short story or the creative production of unduly neglected women writers (or, in the case of Woolf, a prominent modernist figure whose contributions to the genre of the short story have gone understudied). Rather, Drewery proposes to direct her reader's eye to small moments, what she calls "the revelatory moment as a moment of insight," made possible by the intensified double vision of the liminal. Drewery does modernist studies a service by bringing short fiction and its specific thematic, formal, and psychological concerns to the fore, something that only a handful of critics such as Dominic Head and Clare Hanson have done. She extends our understanding of modernist women writers by turning her critical gaze not only on Woolf and Mansfield—often discussed together especially in the context of their short fiction (as for instance in Angela Smith's Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two and Sydney Janet Kaplan's more recent Circulating Genius)—but on Richardson and Sinclair, two fascinating writers whose impact we have yet to fully decipher despite groundbreaking work by critics such as George H. Thomson, Kristin Bluemel, and Elisabeth Bronfen (on Richardson) and Suzanne Raitt (on Sinclair). In a series of chapters focusing on particular tropes, each of which examines the four writers together, Drewery argues that there is a connection between Mansfield's, Woolf's, Sinclair's, and Richardson's interest in liminality and their work in the short story. The real strength of Drewery's method is her close reading; each of the stories she has chosen opens up, lotuslike, to her critical eye, and each of the stories warrants such a method in its careful detail and quiet power. A case is made for the significance of both the authors considered and the genre in which they chose to work.

Drawing heavily on an anthropological framework theorized by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Drewery uses her introductory chapter to define what she calls "the liminal aesthetic," and she claims that short fiction is an ideal vehicle for such an aesthetic because it is "frequently structured around a defining moment or interlude, and reveal[s] a constant preoccupation with transcending boundaries, whether psychological or social, thematic or theoretical." These women are interested in exploring shifting relationships between time and space; structure and antistructure; journeys, arrivals, and endings; and the subtle but nevertheless radical shifts in consciousness and being that an attention to liminality makes possible. Using tropes borrowed from van Gennep and Turner, Drewery explicates her selected texts paying particular attention to how theme illuminates theory, and how literary detail accumulates, gestalt-like, into a phenomenological understanding of the world and its ambivalences. These tropes, which serve to anchor each chapter, include border crossing, rites of passage, anxiety around exclusion, immortality and the uncanny, and instances of revelation and epiphany through the ordinary.

The first chapter, "'The Journey not the Arrival': Pilgrimage as a Modernist Liminal Metaphor," uses the metaphor of the voyage to establish the significance of a dominant tension in modernist short fiction: that between inside and outside, beginning and ending. The characters in stories such as...