This feminist investigation of the works of Clemence Dane joins the
growing body of research into the relationship of female-authored
texts to the ideology and cultural hegemony of the Edwardian and
inter-war period. An amalgam of single-author study and thematic
period analysis, through sustained cultural engagement, this book
explores Dane's journalism, drama and fiction to interrogate a
range of issues: inter-war women's writing, the Middlebrow,
feminism, (homo) sexuality, liberal politics, domesticity, and
concepts of the spinster. It examines form and a range of fictional
genres: drama, bildungsroman, detective fiction, historical saga
and gothic fiction. It relates back to the genre writing of
comparable authors. These include Rosamond Lehmann, Vita
Sackville-West, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Dorothy Strachey, Dodie Smith,
Rachel Ferguson, May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Daphne Du
Maurier, G.B.Stern, and detective writers: Dorothy L. Sayers,
Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, Marjorie Allingham and Ngaio
Marsh. Offering a picture of an era, focalised through Dane and
contextualised through her journalism and the work of her female
peers, it argues that Dane is often markedly more radically
feminist than these contemporaries. She engages with broad issues
of social justice irrespective of gender and her humanity is
demonstrated through her sympathetic representations of
marginalised characters of both sexes. However, she most
specifically evidences a gender politics consistent with the
fragmented and multifarious essentialist feminism that emerged
following the Great War, which esteemed 'womanly' qualities of care
and mothering but simultaneously valued female autonomy, single
status and professionalism. Adopting the critical paradigms of
domestic modernism and women's liminality, the book will
particularly focus on the trajectories of Dane's extraordinary
modern heroines, who possess qualities of altruism, candour,
integrity, imagination, intuition, resilience and rebelliousness.
Over the course of her work, these fictional women increasingly
challenge oppressive normative forms of domesticity, traversing
physical thresholds to create alternative domesticities in
self-defining living and working spaces.
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