Critical Survey

The articles collected in this special issue were originally all delivered as papers at the ‘Hystorical Fictions: Women, History and Authorship’ conference we organised at the University of Wales, Swansea, in August 2003. When we began planning the event – writing the call for papers; contacting academics we thought might be interested in attending – we anticipated that, given the recent prominence of ‘historical fiction’ by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and others, a large number of speakers would want to focus on contemporary women writers’ uses of history. What proved most interesting, however, was the way in which this trend of, to use Adrienne Rich’s term, feminist ‘re-visioning’,1 viewed by so many critics and readers as part of a postmodern literary culture, has its roots in the modernism of the early twentieth century.

Earlier, in 1928, Virginia Woolf had conducted a literary exploration into such transformations of gender in her novel Orlando: A Biography inspired by the sapphic charms and aristocratic history of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West.2 In Woolf ’s text, the eponymous protagonist experiences a series of time slips that coincide with comparable shifts in sex. In his essay ‘The Forest Beyond the Frame: Picturing Women’s Desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf’, Dennis Denisoff demonstrates the unacknowledged influence of Vernon Lee on Woolf’s Orlando.

In the last decade, literary and cultural historians’ scrutiny of relations with those who have gone before – their own dead and those of their subjects – has taken a ghostly turn. Literary history has become haunted. As Helen Sword comments in the epilogue to her Ghostwriting Modernism, ‘hauntology’ of various kinds has become a ‘crowded bandwagon’. Among critics of literary modernism, in particular, the trope of haunting has been much used to think about the period’s relation with the past, and modernists’ own obsessions with ‘the world unseen’ are increasingly being regarded, not as rather embarrassing marginalia, but as central to their aesthetic, formal and political concerns. Modernist writing could well be defined as that which attempts selfconsciously to redefine its relation with those who have gone before, to rattle the bones of literary history until they are rearranged. The trope of haunting goes further in allowing us to see modernism as both an exorcism of the past, and an uneasy possession by the past.

On the title page of her first prose work, Palimpsest (1926), H. D. defines a palimpsest as ‘a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another’.1 Palimpsests were created from the seventh to fifteenth centuries primarily in the scriptoriums of the great monastic institutions such as Bobbio, Luxeuil, Fleury, Corbie and St Gall.2 Such recycling of vellum arose due to a combination of factors: the scarcity and expense of writing material; the physical deterioration of existing manuscripts from which reusable vellum was then sourced; and the changing historical and cultural factors which rendered some texts obsolete either because the language in which they were written could no longer be read, or because their content was no longer valued. Palimpsests were created by a process of layering whereby the existing text was erased using various chemical methods, and the new text was written over the old one. But the most peculiar and interesting fact about palimpsests is omitted from H. D.’s definition. Palimpsests are of such interest to subsequent generations because although the first writing on the vellum seemed to have been eradicated after treatment, it was often imperfectly erased. Its ghostly trace then reappeared in the following centuries as the iron in the remaining ink reacted with the oxygen in the air producing a reddish brown oxide. This process has been encouraged by the use of chemical reagents and ultraviolet light in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by more advanced imaging technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A palimpsest is thus a surface phenomenon where, in an illusion of layered depth, otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other.

Halfway through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), the title character, who lives for over three hundred years, wakes up and discovers that he has become a woman. Although Woolf evidently does not intend us to take this novel entirely seriously, it is clear from the contemporaneous A Room of One’s Own that she is quite serious about deconstructing the boundaries of gender; in Orlando, she calls its categories into question by depicting them as permeable, even arbitrary. In so doing, she flies in the face of her Victorian forebears, as was her wont, critiquing and complicating the prevailing model of male/female as binary opposition.3 Orlando’s sudden, mysterious transformation from male to female initially appears to reflect this binary: ‘Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman, and has remained so ever since’ (139). However, his/her transition is complicated when Orlando enters into a somewhat indeterminate state, escaping from both Constantinople and gender by running away with a ‘gipsy tribe’ (140).

Despite her claims to truth and plainness, however, Montagu’s autobiographical account is embellished, feigned and fragmented. She rewrites herself as a precocious fourteen-year-old as opposed to nineteen, and the related events and emotions do not always correspond with those outlined in her letters. In failing to write in so ‘plain a manner’, Montagu gestures at the inevitable fabrication involved in writing the self and in writing history. In particular, she exposes the difficulty of portraying a protagonist who ‘had a way of thinking very different from that of other Girls’ (79), of inscribing a person who defies the fixed, gendered categories of ‘plain English’. The problematics of depicting history and conforming to that powerful dictator, ‘reputation’, are further evident in Montagu’s ‘History of her Own Times’which she reportedly destroyed ‘as fast as she finished it, in a sustained, heroic act of self-censorship’.2 Indeed, the contradictory impulse to write the life of Montagu and to write it according to the policing gaze of ‘Chastity, Modesty and Purity’ plagues Montagu’s self-representations, as well as those of the critics who attempt to write and edit her life for future readers.

Virginia Woolf made a seminal contribution to feminist literary history and provided the discipline with some of its most memorable quotations. In A Room of One’s Own, she urged her audience of female students at Cambridge University to ‘rewrite history’ by seeking out figures neglected by conventional (patriarchal) histories in order to trace a female tradition, a concept she described as ‘thinking back through our mothers’.1 She sketched how such a tradition might look, tracing a line from Lady Winchilsea and Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen through to George Eliot and the Brontës, considering how the conditions of these writers’ lives affected their work, and also looking at how gender might influence their use of language and choice of genre. Behind Woolf’s historical sketch lies an imaginative attempt to reclaim lost origins: Woolf notes that there was no female Shakespeare because conditions in the Renaissance would have made it impossible for a woman to write for the theatre. She creates an imaginary starting-point for her history by sketching a fictional biography of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, whose life could only have ended in failure and suicide. Woolf concludes by urging her audience to imaginatively reclaim these lost origins in their own writings

Vita Sackville-West received her copy of Orlando from Virginia Woolf on the day of its publication in October 1928. The significance of this act came to represent far more than a literary gesture from one writer to another. An exuberant and unorthodox biography of Vita and her ancestral heritage, Orlando finally enabled Woolf to capture an enduring impression of the woman who had been both her muse and her lover. For Vita Sackville-West, however, Woolf ’s literary offering represented more, even, than this most inspired declaration of affection. For a daughter denied all rights to property inheritance under the laws of male primogeniture, Woolf had provided all that the courts had removed; possession of an ancestral past and access to a familial present. The literary sorcery of a novel that could subvert the sexual identity of its protagonist could, in the same moment, undermine all such legal process and restore Vita/Orlando to her beloved ancestral home. Writing in reply to Woolf, Vita’s expression of gratitude for reuniting her with the memory of Knole, the Sackville-Wests’Kentish estate, is complicated by a remaining sense of grief for her lost inheritance

In representing the past, Herbst continues the realist tradition, utilising the form of the classical historical novel, which, as Georg Lukács describes it, represents the historical past as the ‘concrete prehistory of the present’.2 In ‘reconstruct[ing]’ herself, however, Herbst also deploys avant-garde formal techniques that interrupt the linear narrative chronology with what she called ‘interpretive inserts’.3 Thus, the form of Herbst’s trilogy reveals relationships between history and subjectivity, and the public and the private, that challenge the typical modernist repudiation of the significance of history and the privileging of the private over the public.

Lest We Channel Hop ADRIAN BUCKNER

Sunday, 5 p.m. M5 Survivor MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Wild Track by Mark Haworth-Booth (London: Trace Editions, 2005), 60 pp, ISBN 0-95509-450-X, £10.00

What is the Purpose of Your Visit? by Wanda Barford (Hexham: Flambard Press, 2005), 80 pp, ISBN 1-87322-679-9, £7.50

Under the Hammer by Robert Roberts (London: Pikestaff Press, 2006), 126 pp, ISBN 1-90097-432-0, £7.50

Fighting Talk by Cathy Grindrod, (London: Headland, 2005), 60 pp, ISBN 1-90209-692-4, £7.50

The Rain and The Glass by Robert Nye (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2004), 122 pp, ISBN 1-87155-141-2, £9.95

Highwire by Adrian Caesar (Canberra,Australia: Pandanus Books, 2007), 93 pp, ISBN 1-74076-178-2, £10.00

Catallus by Mario Petrucci (London: Perdika Press, 2006), 24pp, ISBN 1-90564-900-2, £4.50

Notes on contributors