Description
Book SynopsisVirginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a lady novelist. As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents'' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it.
Exploring the connections between Woolf''s immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation''s concerns and controversies to Woolf''s considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf''s creative works, politics, and criticism in
Trade Review
Corbett's meticulously researched study... locates influence socially as well as literarily, and details the societal changes wrought by the female Victorian writers...
* Choice *
In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Well-written and well-informed, this book draws on the latest debates in Woolf scholarship concerning public life, political activism, the professions, and history, and it adds an important dimension to discussion of Woolf and the Victorians.
* Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *
The book provides a road map to guide us through the obscured routes of Woolf's neglected second-generation female predecessors. Corbett makes us pause to consider diversions from the Victorian male-dominated high road trodden by Woolf's father's venerated literary companions—Hardy, James, Meredith—and in some ways by Woolf herself. Through extensive research—patiently plodding along these archival paths—Corbett has made some of those second-generation voices more richly accessible to us.
* Virginia Wolf Miscellany *
A considerable achievement. For too long Woolf has been placed on a pedestal as the 'exceptional' modernist woman, despite the efforts of scholars to challenge this narrative. Corbett offers us a different Woolf, one entangled and immersed in a world richly populated with exceptional women; perhaps a messier, more complicated picture, but one truer and all the more interesting for that.
* Modernism/modernity *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Gender, Greatness, and the "Third Generation"
Interlude I: Grand Reads Woolf
2. New Women and Old: Sarah Grand, Social Purity, and The Voyage Out
Interlude II: Disinterestedness
3. "Ashamed of the Inkpot": Woolf and the Literary Marketplace
Interlude III: Duckworth and Company
4. "To Serve and Bless": Julia Stephen, Isabel Somerset, and Late-Victorian Women's Politics
Interlude IV: Somerset, Symonds,Stephen, and Sexuality
5. "A Diferent Ideal": Representing the Public Woman
