Beyond the Glass and The Shutter of Snow

Abstract

Caricatured representations of Emily Holmes Coleman and Antonia White as modernist madwomen do not survive attention to their life and words. We saw in the previous chapter that their unpublished accounts of experience present distinct, self-conscious and deliberate life narratives. They are different to each other, and to the much better known diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf, who occupies a dominant place in the modernist field. The private writings of these three women disclose the centre and margins of English modernism. The novels of White and Coleman are also uncelebrated and their contribution to modernist canons assessed only occasionally. It is not my intention here to argue that this marginalisation is unjust, nor to reconfigure modernism with White and Coleman as central. Instead, I want to examine their novels as cultural representations of madness, distinct from the experiential accounts that were the focus of the previous chapter.