Exploring the Modernist State of England Novel by Women Novelists: Rebecca West, Radclyffe Hall and Winifred Holtby

This paper means to focus on three novels by three British women novelists of the 1920s and 1930s: Rebecca West, Radclyffe Hall and Winifred Holtby. While Holtby’s South Riding (1936), which offers a satiric depiction of post-World War I England and engages directly with the contemporary social and political issues, seems to fit quite easily the definition of the Victorian Condition of England novel, the others are more difficult to label. West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) deals, as the title suggests, with the return of a veteran and has been mainly analysed as a pioneering study of shell-shock and of the traumatic experience of the First World War; Radclyffe Hall’s Adam’s Breed (1926) ranks with the forgotten works of art of the early twentieth century, overshadowed as it has been by the scandalous fame and trial of The Well of Loneliness (1928). This paper will argue that these novels are State of England novels, albeit of a new brand. Under the guise of dealing with the traumatic experience of World War One, West and Hall’s novels comment upon their own society. Adopting narrative techniques at odds with the Victorian Condition of England novel, building on E. M. Forster’s State of England novel and questioning it, departing from Holtby’s own brand of satire (and yet meeting her in some measure), these novelists offer from their own specific vantage points (and various social backgrounds) their views on wealth and poverty, social classes, the condition of women or immigrants. On the whole, they rethink the role of the war and of women while assessing the state of England and radically exposing the mechanisms of the English society of their time. The purpose of this paper will be both to reexamine or re-value these novels and show how, in original and yet somewhat similar ways, they reinvent the genre of the Condition and State of England novel, weaving into their writings intertextual references, utopias and various forms of indirection that end up in delineating an original anatomy of the English nation