This theoretically sophisticated reading of three lesbian writersStein, Hall, and Barnesis at once playful and serious. Roches insistence on the queerness of desire, romance, and love between women takes feminist modernist studies in an exciting new direction. -- Laura Doan, author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War In its lively endorsement of lesbian modernism, The Outside Thing extols the possibilities and pleasures three canonical writers find as they playfully occupy, exploit, and expand conventions of romance and marriage in their intimate lives and iconic writing. Affectionately championing Stein, Hall, and Barnes as liberating the romance plot from its heteronormative constraints, Hannah Roche also aims to rescue these writers from timeworn scholarly assumptions that have held them hostage. -- Jodie Medd, author of Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism Hannah Roches The Outside Thing is a valuable contribution to current debates about modernism, sexuality, and womens writing. Roches provocationthat the term lesbian is a critically and theoretically necessary oneis borne out convincingly in her lively and thorough readings of romance in the lives, writing, and writing-lives of Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. This is a book that subsequent scholars will learn from. -- Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University Employing extensive archival research and a groundbreaking theoretical approach, Roche cogently argues that modernists such as Stein, Radclyffe, and Barnes crafted heterosexual narratives (romances) that develop lesbian themes. Highly recommended. * Choice * Hannah Roches study of three major lesbian writers of the Modernist periodGertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnespresents a finely framed discussion of how these writers both embodied the innovations of modernist literary practice while integrating the narrative frames of Victorian romance novels into their texts. . . Roches book offers a compelling examination of these writers and is well worth study. * Review of English Studies * It seems an apt time to be considering the ways the pre-sexological narrative forms of depicting intimacy between women filter into the modern moment. Roche provides us with a resource for doing just that. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
