The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Development in the Early Twentieth Century

This book presents a detailed examination of the ways in which a number of women writers portrayed the crises and conflicts in the development of the female consciousness in novels which were a response to the rapidly changing world of the early twentieth century. The differences in approach from that of many male-authored texts highlight the anomalies of a time when opportunities for self-expression and fulfilment were beginning to open up for women but nineteenth-century values and prejudices still widely prevailed. The writers considered here (May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Rosamond Lehmann, Antonia White and Dorothy Richardson) have been consistently underrated, marginalized or ignored by much serious criticism and this discussion aims to reinstate them not only as entertaining writers but in their outspoken approach to the problems confronting women and in their often original experimentation in narrative techniques as important contributors to the development of the English novel.