Modernist Voyages Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945

London's literary and cultural scene fostered newly configured forms of feminist anticolonialism during the modernist period. Through their writing in and about the imperial metropolis, colonial women authors not only remapped the city, they also renegotiated the position of women within the empire. This book examines the significance of gender to the interwoven nature of empire and modernism. As transgressive figures of modernity, writers such as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson and Sarojini Naidu brought their own versions of modernity to the capital, revealing the complex ways in which colonial identities 'traveled' to London at the turn of the twentieth century. Anna Snaith's original study provides an alternative vantage point on the urban metropolis and its artistic communities for scholars and students of literary modernism, gender and postcolonial studies, and English literature more broadly.

Introduction; 1. Olive Schreiner: diamonds, prostitution and From Man to Man; 2. Sarojini Naidu: feminist nationalism and cross-cultural poetics; 3. Sara Jeannette Duncan: A Canadian Girl in London; 4. Katherine Mansfield: colonial modernism and the magazines; 5. Jean Rhys: 'A Savage from the Cannibal Islands'; 6. Una Marson: 'Little brown girl' in a 'white, white city'; 7. Christina Stead: transnationalism and the sea voyage; Afterword; Bibliography.

Anna Snaith is a Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at King's College London. She holds a BA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from University College London. She is the author of Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (2000), editor of Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies (2007) and co-editor of Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place (with Michael Whitworth, 2007). She recently edited Virginia Woolf's The Years for the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (2012).