We do not talk about the reading... let's talk about something else
A particularly sparse week this week, as Sekkrit Projekt reading has been a) pressing and b) actually rather engaging, so there has been very little me-reading at all, except for Jill Paton Walsh's The Late Scholar. to which I succumbed.
Perhaps this is therefore a good time to talk about a swathe of writers I am not reading, even though I should quite like to do a spot of re-reading:
robot_mel asked me to talk about early C20th women writers, so here goes.
I sometimes classify the writers I like as the 'middlebrows', because that's largely how they were positioned at the time, since they're not really massively about the formal experimentation with literary technique and obvious mdoernism, etc etc, though, having said which, on my 'really ought to read again' list is Dorothy Richardson's massive 'Pilgrimage' sequence which was a key text in the development of 'stream of consciousness' as a mode.
However, the writers I really love from the period are more about a modernism of subject rather than style, i.e. the situation of women in a rapidly changing world. In particular, they were doing things that had previously not been done, or only done in a very simplistic and patronising way, e.g. opening up to a wider range of characters.
There's a fair amount on the ghastliness of the marriage market and the waiting around to be chosen and the ease of missing the moment. But there's also the life of the working, economically independent woman, and how hard that is to give up, and how being taken care of is not recompense enough.
The Great War is also there even if not explicitly.
They're much more on board with the pleasures of modernity than most of the male writers of the era. Stella Gibbons in the non-Cold Comfort Farms is particularly good on what shops like Woolworths meant for women without lots of money and the delights of Lyons Tea Shops.
I suppose I somewhat do the hipster thing of 'I liked them before they were discovered by Virago/Persephone Books/Vintage' etc, when finding an unread book by Delafield or Stern was an exciting moment in a secondhand bookshop (and I went totally mad filling in the gaps when internet bookbuying became a thing).
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