Roomscape Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf

by Bernstein, Susan David

• ISBN13: 9780748640652
• ISBN10: 0748640657
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-03-28
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

Roomscape 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 upholds this spatial conceit.

Author Biography

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