This collection explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers incorporated the idea of place into their writing. Whether writing from a specific location or focusing upon a particular geographical or imaginary place, women writers working between 1850 and 1950 valued a space of their own in which to work. The period on which this collection focuses straddles two main areas of study, nineteenth century writing and early twentieth century/modernist writing, so it enables discussion of how ideas of space progressed alongside changes in styles of writing. It looks to the many ways women writers explored concepts of space and place and how they expressed these through their writings, for example how they interpreted both urban and rural landscapes and how they presented domestic spaces.
A Space of Their Own will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and modernist works as it covers a period of immense change for womens rights in society. It is also not limited to just one type or definition of space. Therefore, it may also be of interest to academics outside of literature for example, in gender studies, cultural geography, place writing and digital humanities.
Introduction Dr. Katie Baker and Dr. Naomi Walker
Part 1 Women Writing the Domestic Space
Chapter 1 It is home, and I cant put its charm into words (Elizabeth
Gaskell, North and South): Radically Extending Domesticity in Elizabeth
Gaskells North and South
Dr. Katie Baker
Chapter 2 The Room I sit in: Womens Refashioning of the Drawing-Room in
Fin-de-Sičcle and Modernist Writing
Dr. Emma Liggins
Chapter 3 Fleece in the hedge: Domesticity and Depiction among Women
Writers of the Interwar Years
Dr. Geraldine Perriam
Part 2 Women Writing the Rural Space
Chapter 4 Mountains, Therapy and the Peripatetic Writing Space: Elizabeth
le Blond in France and Switzerland in the 1880s
Dr. Kathryn Walchester
Chapter 5 Walking and Writing the Rural: Mary Webb and the Shropshire
Landscape
Dr. Naomi Walker
Chapter 6 Spangin and Stravaiging: Scottish Women Writers and the Nature
of Rural Modernity
Helena Duncan
Part 3 Women Writing the Public Space
Chapter 7 Theres London!: Spatial affects and urban environments in Ella
Hepworth Dixons The Story of a Modern Woman
Cigdem Talu
Chapter 8 Utopian spaces, public places: considering the perils and
pleasures of crossing domestic thresholds in The Womans Side and The More I
See of Men
Dr. Louise McDonald
Part 4 Women Writing New Interpretations of Space
Chapter 9 Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined
feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her (George Eliot, Daniel
Deronda): Lyric Space in Nineteenth-Century Womens Writing.
Professor Josie Billington
Chapter 10 R. A. Kartini and the Many Faces of Colonial Female Subject:
Domestic Cosmopolitanism in Colonial Indonesia
Dr. Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert
Chapter 11 Spatial and Sensory Aesthetics in Virginia Woolfs Orlando
(1928)
Annie Strausa
Conclusion Dr. Katie Baker and Dr. Naomi Walker
Katie Baker was awarded a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chester in 2018. Her research focuses on female sexuality, domesticity and the 'businesswoman' in the work of nineteenth-century women writers. She has published on Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant and is currently an independent researcher.
Naomi Walker is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. Her PhD research was based on the two Shropshire feminist writers, Mary Webb (18811927) and Mary Cholmondeley (18591925), and she used GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software to plot their lives and works within the Shropshire area.
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