The Bloomsbury Modernisms of Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner

Bloomsbury’s fame as a uniquely privileged site of modernist innovation is largely based on the art, writing, relationships and philosophies of the Bloomsbury Group at their peak in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet 40 years prior, Bloomsbury also played host to a less well-defined circle of (proto-)modernist writers and radicals, including sometime friends, the writers Olive Schreiner and Margaret Harkness. The chapter deploys a globalised reading of George Lukács’s work on the ideology of modernism to read the overlapping and co-determined socialist and feminist modernisms of Harkness’s novel, Out of Work (1888) and Schreiner’s allegory, ‘The Sunlight Lay Across My Bed’ (1890). Reading the allegorical forms of Schreiner’s South African modernism as genealogically distinct from the Naturalist forms of Harkness’s early English modernism, the chapter nevertheless argues for the importance of cross-cultural connections, reciprocity, conversation, and communities of exchange, in the co-determined, yet distinct, emerging modernisms of the fin de siècle.