Exemplary Intermodernists: Stevie Smith, Inez Holden, Betty Miller, and Naomi Mitchison

Abstract

For most of the twentieth century, Modernism was not kind to British women writers. They have fared much better since the advent of the New Modernist Studies, evidence of which can be found in almost any anthology on Modernism published since 1999.¹ For example, in Stephen Matthews’s Modernism: A Sourcebook (2008), three of the seven writers included in the chronological list of major literary texts for that astonishing year, 1922, are women.² Two of these women writers, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, we expect to find on such lists. The other, May Sinclair, who is best known for using the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe a narrative style, seems an eccentric choice.³ Such eccentric choices come as happy discoveries for scholars and students committed to understanding the full history of women’s writing from 1920 to 1945, but Modernism as it traditionally has been understood, and even in some cases as it is currently being revised, does not necessarily provide a satisfying framework for understanding Sinclair’s writing or the writing of other women whose work has not been perceived as sufficiently formally innovative.