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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

The Edinburgh Companion to Place and Space in Interwar Women’s Writing in English

Edited by Nicola Darwood and Nick Turner

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Published 31 March 2027

About this book

Explores how place, space and everyday life were represented in interwar women’s writing in English

  • Presents critical readings of a range of canonical and non-canonical women writers in the interwar period
  • Provides a wide-ranging discussion of issues faced by women and society in the years following one devastating war, and during the years before the onset of another world war
  • Includes discussions of poetry, prose, and plays, drawing on a range of academic fields, including literary analysis, literary history, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and sociological theory

This Companion considers how ideas of place and space were articulated in prose, poetry and plays by women in the interwar period. By examining the works of canonical and non-canonical Anglophone authors from 1918–1939, it provides a wide-ranging discussion of women’s roles in society and the issues they faced in the time between two devastating global conflicts. In particular, it interrogates the ways in which women writers imagined community and narrated their domestic, local, national and international geographies in fiction, in verse and on the stage. Its twenty-six chapters take a variety of methodological approaches, including archival research, theoretical discussion, close reading and in-depth case studies, and draw on a number of academic fields, spanning across literary history, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and sociology. The contributors’ detailed explorations of interwar modernist literature enable a deeper appreciation of the everyday concerns of women in the aftermath of one world war and the years leading up to the next, especially what they thought about gender, borders, migration and the concept of ‘home’.

Reviews

If you thought you knew about women writers in the interwar period, think again. With chapters touching on a wide range of women’s writing about spaces and places, this book brings together canonical and lesser-known authors to show what a varied, unexplored terrain the interwar years still are for feminist scholarship.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Understanding and Redefining Place and Space in Interwar Women's Writing in English
Nicola Darwood and Nick Turner

Part I. The Politics of Home
1. Metaphor for a Marriage: The Construction of ‘home’ in The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West and Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim
Jackie Goodman
2. In the Boudoir: Spaces of Feminine Self-Fashioning in the Work of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth von Arnim, Daphne du Maurier and D. E. Stevenson
Jennifer Shepherd
3. Heterotopic Reflections in Between the Acts: Pointz Hall, Mirrors and the Pageant
Demet Karabulut Dede
4. Finding Room and a Place: G. B. Stern and the Politics of the Family House
Alexis Weedon
5. Reimagining Domestic Space in Leonora Carrington’s ‘becoming animal’ Narratives
Karen Eckersley
6. ‘A Man’s Place is in the Home?’: Women and the Home in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers
Suzanne Bray

Part II. Betwixt and Between
7. Between Flat Surfaces and Hard Edges in Treadwell’s Machinal
Lynn Deboek
8. ‘Woman on the Verge’: Mary Fitt, Borders and the Country House Novel of the 1930s
Nick Turner
9. Challenging class attitudes in Noel Streatfeild’s The Circus is Coming/Circus Shoes (1938)
Deborah Giggle
10. Refusing the Tragic Pose: Zora Neale Hurston and the Cultural Politics of the Harlem Renaissance
Oliver Belas

Part III. Tales of Travel
11. ‘When I was young, I travelled by mistake, but now I do it on purpose’: The Worlds of Stella Benson
Nicola Darwood
12. ‘This isn’t the sort of place you’d get a body!’: Tourism, Fantasy and Spatial Performance in Agatha Christie’s Holiday Novels
Brittain Bright
13. The Englishman on My Shoulder: The Spatial Determination of Middle-Class Femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s In the Mountains and The Enchanted April
Elizabeth Floyd
14. A Provincial Cosmopolitanism: The Country and the City in E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady
Shinjini Chattopadhyay
15. Home Is Where the Train Station Is: Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and a Mobile Domesticity
Margaret Mauk

Part IV. Rural and Urban
16. The ‘housed wattle’ and the ‘flint cottage’: Sylvia Townsend Warner Re-Places the Chimney Ornament
Claire Pelly
17. ‘I in space—': Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Poetic Relationship with New York City
Celeste van der Linde
18. A Country of One’s Own: Adapting Woolfian Space and Place in Mollie Panter-Downes’s My Husband Simon
Melissa Dinsman
19. Spectres of War in the Modern City: Post-War London as a Site of Memory in Storm Jameson’s The Mirror in Darkness Trilogy
Angela Smith
20. Escaping to Barsetshire: Angela Thirkell’s Therapeutic Landscape
Geraldine Perriam
21. ‘A removal […] is like a slow journey across difficult country’: Interwar Transitions in English National Identity
Lauren Macpherson
22. Female Agency and Power in Hilda Vaughan’s Interwar Writing
Philip Miles

Part V. Psychological Spaces
23. ‘Rooms again’ – Spatiality in H.D.’s Tribute to Freud
Elisabeth Punzi and Cornelia Wächter
24. Safe Spaces: Lyric Refuge in H.D.’s Madrigal Cycle
Kate Eliot
25. ‘Geography of Echoes:’ A Study of Topographical Montage in Leonora Carrington’s Novella Little Francis
Penny Simpson
26. Liminality and Displacement in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart
Layla Ferrández Melero

Coda: From the Parlour to Outer Space
Nick Turner and Nicola Darwood

Notes on Contributors
Index

About the contributors

Nicola Darwood

Nicola Darwood is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Director of the Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. Her research interests include early twentieth-century women writers, specifically the work of Elizabeth Bowen and Stella Benson. She has published widely on Elizabeth Bowen, Stella Benson and Nancy Spain, including her monograph A World of Lost Innocence: the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen (2012). She is the co-chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and co-editor of The Elizabeth Bowen Review.

Nick Turner

Nick Turner is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University and a Lecturer at Kirklees College, UK. He is the co-chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and co-editor of the Elizabeth Bowen Review. He has published work on Elizabeth von Arnim, Mary Fitt, Barbara Comyns and interwar and post-war women writers more widely, including his monograph Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon (2010).

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