Women’s Urban Modernity: Brontë, Gaskell and Woolf

Abstract

This chapter proposes a fresh perspective on a firmly established theme in current modernity studies. It has been widely acknowledged that women writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf have held a key role in mapping the challenges and opportunities of urban modernity from a gendered perspective, and in the process laid the foundations of what came to be regarded as a tradition of British women’s urban writing. I approach this much discussed topic by drawing a parallel between two narratives of urban modernity, pertaining not only to different genres, but also to different spatial and temporal contexts. The first is a predominantly celebratory representation of spatial change in the industrial metropolis as presented in women’s early urban novels. The second is the theory of urban space advanced by postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, which introduces the term ‘postmodern hyperspace’ to describe the feelings of malaise and disorientation produced by the ‘unprecedented’ spatial changes associated with the post-1960s Western metropolis.