3 Review(s)

Mixing modernist outliers such as Edith Wharton and Agatha Christie with more canonical figures such as Virginia Woolf and arguing that these novelists shared an interest in negotiating the relationship between standardization and conformity, on the one hand, and novelty and individual expression, on the other, Modernism, Fashion and Women's Writing deliberately works against conventional notions of historical periodisation and challenges critical conceptions that pit modernist elitism against middlebrow consumerism as mutually defining opposites. It draws on previously unstudied material from these writers personal and professional archives to tell the stories of five women novelists who carefully negotiated commercial success and artistic autonomy in a marketplace that had made fashion one of its most significant yet often disclaimed inspirations and concerns.