British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: (Re)Mapping the Post-War British Literary Landscape

   • Andrew Radford, Hannah Van Hove

   Pages 1-37

3. Conditions of Experiment: Post-war Contexts

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39

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   2. Feeling “The High-Voltage Current of the General Pass”: Experiments in Subjectivity in British Women’s Fiction in the Wake of World War II

      • Hannah Van Hove

      Pages 41-60

   3. A Precarious Vision: Hallucination and the Short Story in Post-War Britain

      • Natalie Ferris

      Pages 61-81

   4. Whose Sister? “Convenient Pigeonholes”, Peter Owen and the Publishing of Anna Kavan

      • Leigh Wilson

      Pages 83-101

   5. Contacts, Landings: The Holocaust and Late Modernist Form in Eva Figes and Eva Tucker

      • Adam Guy

      Pages 103-123

4. Belonging Nowhere? Experimental Women Writers Reconsidered

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 125-125

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   2. No Country for Old Maids? Housing Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mid-Century Fiction

      • Andrew Radford

      Pages 127-151

   3. Anna Kavan’s Ice: Postwar Experimentalism and the Fiction of the Anthropocene

      • Victoria Walker

      Pages 153-172

   4. Shelagh Delaney’s Sweetly Sings the Donkey (1963) and Experimentalism After the Angry Young Men

      • Joseph Darlington

      Pages 173-193

   5. “Designing Its Own Shadow”: Ann Quin’s Reiterative Experimental Processes

      • Nonia Williams

      Pages 195-213

   6. “Simply as an Instrument”: The Female Characters of Christine Brooke-Rose

      • Stephanie Jones

      Pages 215-234

   7. Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, or the Post-war Novel’s Transition from an “Exhausted” to a “Replenished” Form

      • Karen Zouaoui

      Pages 235-255

   8. Experimenting in the Ditch: Buchi Emecheta’s Early Novels of Transformation

      • Elisabeth Bekers

      Pages 257-278

   9. Afterword: I’m a Woman Experimental Writer … Get Me Out of Here!

      • Carole Sweeney

      Pages 279-284

5. Back Matter

   Pages 285-292

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This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.

• Avant-garde
• Post-war fiction
• Modernism
• Surrealism
• Situationism
• Virginia Woolf
• Angela Carter
• Eva Figes
• Anna Kavan
• Doris Lessing
• Iris Murdoch
• Ann Quin
• Muriel Spark
• Jean Rhys

• Department of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

  Andrew Radford

• Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

  Hannah Van Hove

Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in modernist and contemporary Anglo-American Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has published The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875-1947 (2018) and has co-edited two previous collections of essays: Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880-1940: Channel Packets (2012), and Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness (2017).  

Hannah Van Hove is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Free University in Brussels, Belgium, where she is conducting a research project on British post-war experimental women's writing. She completed her PhD on the fiction of Anna Kavan, Alexander Trocchi and Ann Quin at the University of Glasgow, UK, in 2017. She is Chair of the Anna Kavan Society and sits on the editorial board of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings.