Lorna Sage looks at the ways in which pre-war women writers, some famous, some less well known, invented themselves as authors in the face of the rigid conceptions of feminine creativity which prevailed at the time.
These authors include Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Christina Stead, Djuna Barnes, Violet Trefusis, Jane Bowles, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Brooke-Rose, Iris Murdoch, and Angela Carter. Most of these writers are now canonised, others remain on the fringes of our attention. All of them had trouble inventing themselves, and some did it more than once.
Accessible and fiercely intelligent, this book looks at the process by which particular books - and whole writing lives - materialised against the odds.
