Women, Modernism and British Poetry 1910-39: Resisting Femininity

Modernism as a period consists of progressive and reactionary cultural cross-currents. Under the umbrella of ‘Rear-guard modernism’ I explore poetry which is not formally adventurous but which represents a ‘conservative modernity’, that is women’s simultaneous internalisation and rejection of contemporary idealisations of femininity. It includes poems of the First World War and poets associated with the so-called ‘Georgians’, Frances Cornford and Vita Sackville-West. Their writing often registers an official public discourse in conflict with an unarticulated, non-symbolised, resistance to the literary and social formations of the feminine, particularly with reference to the idealised maternal function. In the remaining sections I argue for women’s participation in modernist innovation through radical aesthetics, radical perspectives or radical subject matter. In ‘The British Avant-Garde’, the most significant experimentalist is Edith Sitwell, but the less well-known work of Nancy Cunard, Iris Tree and Helen Rootham is also historically significant. ‘The Anglo-American Avant-Garde’ incorporates Mina Loy who was British but settled in the United States and American women who lived in Britain or who were indirectly influential through the network of writers in London