Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of other women writers during the first decades of the twentieth-century.  This volume not only expands our understanding of an unprecedented number of female writers but also helps us comprehend the ways that these writers contributed to and complicated modernist literature.  It explores how burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersected with and coexisted alongside Virginia Woolf and emphasizes both the development of enclaves and specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf.  The essays in the first section, “Who Are Virginia Woolf’s Female Contemporaries,” explore the boundaries of contemporaneity by considering women across nation, time, and class.  The second section, “Cultural Contexts,” explores Woolf’s connections to early twentieth-century culture such as film and book societies. The two final sections, “Recovery and Recuperation,” and “Connections Between Canonical Writers,” illuminate the interlocking network of women writers and artists, the former through women who have been bereft of scholarly attention and the latter through women who have received more scholarly attention.  One of the most enticing sections of the volume is the collection of essays presented during the conference’s Jane Marcus’s memorial. Three of Marcus’s students celebrate the life, work, and influence of this unparalleled Woolf scholar.