Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) - Hardcover

Susan David Bernstein

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0748640657 ISBN 13: 9780748640652

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2013

Synopsis

This book examines the Reading Room of the British Museum as a space of imaginative and historically generative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early twentieth-century London. Drawing on archival materials around this national library reading room, Roomscape is the first study that integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own and the legions of feminist scholarship that uphold this spatial conceit. Susan David Bernstein argues not only that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women's literary traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf's feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, individual events, Roomscape considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered dimensions of literary production. In addition to new perspectives on George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Virginia Woolf, Roomscape offers original research on other novelists, poets, and translators including Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Looking at the Reading Room of the British Museum as a networking site for a variety of readers, this study examines political radicals and women activists who found a transnational community in this London public space. An appendix of notable readers lists details of more than 200 women readers who registered for admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum from the middle of the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.

About this title

Review:

"Roomscape deserves to find a readership, for its original pursuit of a rich topic and the possibilities it suggests for further study."--Matthew Ingleby, TLS

"By drawing women back towards the foci of 19th-century intellectual life, Bernstein has done library history a great service."--Colin Higgins, Librarian, St Catharine's College, Cambridge, THE

About the Author:

Susan David Bernstein is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0748640657
• ISBN 13: 9780748640652
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248